The Beatles stopped recording together in 1969, but their songs have found an unexpected second life in universities, laboratories and scientific journals.
A new study has identified 3,200 academic paper titles that borrow from Beatles songs or lyrics, published between 1970 and 2025.
Some repeat the original titles. Others reshape them into jokes involving diseases, mathematical concepts, insects and occasionally monkeys.
Among the more memorable examples is “The lung and winding road,” the title of a paper about inflammation and platelet activity in people with long COVID.
A quantum computing paper became “Here comes the SU(N),” using the notation for a mathematical group. Researchers developing virtual-reality training for beekeepers chose “Let it bee.”
Patent law produced one of the study’s most elaborate discoveries: “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my patented monkey.”
The examples are amusing, but together they also demonstrate how deeply the language of the Beatles has settled into everyday culture.
Phrases written for pop records in the 1960s now appear naturally in discussions of medicine, economics, engineering and computer science.
A long afterlife in academia
The study was conducted by Gabriel Budel and Robert E. Kooij of Delft University of Technology and Michiel Tjepkema of Radboud University.
Published in PLOS One, it found more than 2,200 direct references to Beatles titles or lyrics and nearly 1,000 examples of creative wordplay.
“The Long and Winding Road” was the clear favorite. It appeared in almost 800 academic titles, describing difficult journeys through subjects including vaccine development, epilepsy treatment, cancer research and financial technology.
“With a Little Help from My Friends” appeared more than 200 times, often in research involving cooperation, social networks or biological processes that depend on one another. “Here, There and Everywhere” appeared about 130 times.
The popularity of those particular titles is not difficult to understand. Research is often slow and unpredictable.
It usually requires help from colleagues, and its results may emerge in more places than anyone initially expected.
Other songs found more specialized uses. “Here Comes the Sun” appeared in studies of vitamin D, solar energy, weather and laws requiring doctors to disclose financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies.
“Ticket to Ride” was used for research involving transportation, migration and the movement of organisms. “A Hard Day’s Night” proved useful to people studying shift work, sleep and demanding schedules.
When scientists rewrite the songs
The researchers also looked for titles that altered familiar Beatles phrases.
These included “Hair, there, and everywhere,” from a medical report about a throat infection apparently initiated by an ingested pet hair, and “Leucine in the sky with diamonds,” which replaced Lucy with an amino acid.
“All You Need Is Love” was especially adaptable. Scientists produced “All you need is sleep,” “RNA is all you need” and “All you need is NAD+?”
Researchers were also willing to question the optimism of the originals, offering titles such as “With a little help from my enemies” and “Money can’t buy me hygge.”
The most influential example was “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture underlying modern large language models.
It has since been cited nearly 90,000 times in Scopus and has inspired hundreds of similarly constructed titles.
There is a neat circularity to that story. The Dutch researchers used a small language model descended from transformer technology to help locate Beatles wordplay in academic databases.
They then checked the suggested matches by hand, sometimes debating whether a title contained a deliberate reference or merely a coincidental collection of words.
Separating references from coincidences
The researchers used strict rules. They excluded single-word Beatles titles such as “Yesterday,” “Rain” and “Because” because those words commonly appear without any musical intention.
They also omitted familiar expressions such as “A Day in the Life” and “All Together Now” unless a title contained stronger evidence of a Beatles connection.
The goal was to count recognizable references, not every scientific paper that happened to share a few words with a song.
Even under those restrictions, Beatles references appeared across medicine, social science, economics, computing, engineering, environmental science and the humanities.
Their use began increasing rapidly in the 1990s, when many people who had grown up with the band were well established in academic careers.
The Beatles were also much more common than other major recording artists.
The researchers found that the 10 most frequently used Beatles titles appeared in more than 1,500 papers.
Comparable searches involving Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson produced far fewer results.
The study does not establish that a playful title makes research more important or more likely to be cited. It may simply make an otherwise technical paper easier to notice and remember.
It also offers an unusual measure of cultural endurance.
Music once played on transistor radios and vinyl records now echoes through digital databases, attached to research on technologies and medical treatments that did not exist when the songs were written.
The Beatles songs most often used in scientific paper titles
These figures count exact appearances of song titles in academic article titles indexed by Scopus. They do not include altered versions or other forms of wordplay.
- The Long and Winding Road - 798 papers
- With a Little Help from My Friends - 209
- Here, There and Everywhere - 129
- Here Comes the Sun - 103
- Let It Be - 98
- Ticket to Ride - 79
- A Hard Day’s Night - 50
- All You Need Is Love - 45
- Magical Mystery Tour - 39
- We Can Work It Out - 34
- Can’t Buy Me Love - 29
- Hello, Goodbye - 28
- Fixing a Hole - 22
- Back in the U.S.S.R. - 21
- Drive My Car - 20
- Nowhere Man - 17
- Glass Onion - 15
- Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) - 15
- Strawberry Fields Forever - 15
- Eight Days a Week - 14
- Yellow Submarine - 14
Some of the best Beatles-inspired paper titles
- The lung and winding road: a paper about inflammation in long COVID.
- Here comes the SU(N): a quantum computing paper using mathematical notation in place of “sun.”
- Let it bee: a study about virtual-reality training for beekeepers.
- Hair, there, and everywhere: a medical report involving an ingested pet hair.
- Leucine in the sky with diamonds: a biomedical variation featuring the amino acid leucine.
- With a little help from my enemies: a paper about bacterial virulence.
- Money can’t buy me hygge: a study of Danish middle-class consumption.
- Happiness is a warm theorem: a mathematical take on “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.”
- Lucy in the sky without diamonds: a computer-security paper about stealing confidential information from the cloud.
- Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my patented monkey: a legal article about patenting cloned organisms.
About the study
- Title: How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles:
Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature
using large language models - Link: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0356147
- Authors:
Gabriel Budel, Robert E. Kooij and Michiel Tjepkema - Journal:
PLOS One - Publication date:
Sept. 9, 2026 - DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0356147
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