Study Finds Beatles Are Most Frequently Cited Musical Group in Scientific Literature
A new paper in PLoS ONE finds The Beatles are the most frequently referenced musical group in scientific literature, with more than 3,000 references. The paper cites puns such as “The lung and winding road” and “Here comes the SU(N),” following a tradition that includes a long-running Bob Dylan lyric bet at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.
Gabriel Budel of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, a co-author of the paper, said some of the references are “genuinely brilliant.” He cited “The lung and winding road,” which he described as a paper on Long COVID that changes one vowel of the Beatles title, and “Here comes the SU(N),” which turns “Here Comes the Sun” into a quantum computing paper about mathematical groups. “Someone was having a very good day at their desk,” Budel said.
The Beatles result follows earlier evidence that scientists deliberately use pop lyrics in academic work. In 2014, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden revealed that they had been inserting Bob Dylan lyrics into their papers as part of a long-running bet. The practice began with a 1997 Nature review entitled “Nitric Oxide and inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind.”
That disclosure led to a 2015 study examining whether Dylan lyrics appeared elsewhere in the biomedical literature. According to Ars Technica, the most frequently referenced Dylan songs in that study were “The Times They Are A’Changin’” and “Blowing in the Wind.”