All you need is a Beatles lyric, TU Delft researchers find

Researchers at TU Delft have found Beatles lyrics and song titles in more than 3,000 titles of scientific articles, according to a new paper in the open-access journal PLOS One.

Gabriel Budel and Rob Kooij of TU Delft teamed up with Michiel Tjepkema, co-host of the Dutch Beatles podcast Fab4Cast, to look for the lyrics here, there and everywhere across the scientific disciplines.

They identified 2,237 exact references and 963 examples of creative wordplay in data from the academic database Scopus.

The most used songs were “The Long and Winding Road” (798 mentions), “With a Little Help from My Friends” (209) and “Here, There and Everywhere” (129). The most cited paper was “Attention is all you need”, the 2017 paper that introduced the architecture behind ChatGPT – and a play on “All You Need Is Love”.

According to Budel, it’s not all too much. “Some of these are genuinely brilliant. ‘The lung and winding road’ is a paper on long Covid that changes one vowel,” he said in a statement.

The undertaking was not a hard day’s night. The team used a large language model to identify the lyrics, but they couldn’t just let it be. “The three of us then went through every selected title by hand to determine if it really was a Beatles pun,” Budel said.

The group didn’t stop until they got enough. They also found lyrics from Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley, though far fewer than the Beatles.

The researchers weren’t all shook up by their findings. Pop culture references can help reach a wider audience and improve readability, they said.