All together now: Disentangling Beatles’ song titles in medical research articles

The purpose of this paper is to understand the reason(s) why Beatles’ song titles are used as titles for medical research publications. 546 article titles have been collected over a period of 57 years (1965–2022) and linguistically analysed. Titles were classified according to three different perspectives: (1) a textual perspective (level of informativeness); (2) a sentence viewpoint (information packaging and meaning); and at (3) the lexical level (degree of accessibility and referential transparency). Here we show that the Beatles' quotations have gradually augmented over the years, with a peak in 2002, and then a gradual rise up to 2021, with a preference for using compound (57.32%) and nominal (38.09%) titles. As to the way in which information is packaged, titles are primarily focus ones (62.08). Interestingly, well 75.64% titles are constructed with no specialized language, while only 5.86% titles are ‘language as mention’, that is titles with markedly non-specialized items which appear to be borrowed from the song itself and stylistically marked with the actual quotations. Our findings suggest that, by quoting a Beatles song title, the author of the publication clearly creates an attention-seeking device with startling effect. Such an approach does not appear to be dependent on a specific period of time, journal, or Beatles song. They can thus be defined as attractors.