Scientists have shown that they can't resist adding a touch of The Beatles to their research, with their work littered with references to the iconic band's songs and lyrics. For instance, a paper on Long COVID cleverly changed the title to "The lung and winding road" by altering just one vowel, while another quantum computing paper adopted the familiar 'Here Comes the Sun' to discuss mathematical groups.

The phenomenon isn't new—back in 2014, a group of scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden revealed they had been secretly inserting Bob Dylan lyrics into their papers as part of a bet, starting with a 1997 Nature review. They even conducted a study to see if Dylan lyrics were appearing elsewhere in the biomedical literature, with 'The Times They Are A’Changin'’ and 'Blowing in the Wind' topping the charts.

Meteorologists and climate scientists also got in on the act, with a 2017 study comparing the frequency of Dylan and Beatles lyrics. The Beatles emerged victorious, with their songs making more appearances than Dylan's. A 2023 analysis of The Clash's 'Should I Stay or Should I Go' further cemented this trend, with The Clash's lyrics being referenced 408 times, compared to 236 for 'The Long and Winding Road' and 128 for 'The Times They Are A’Changin'’.

Now, a team led by Gabriel Budel at Delft University of Technology are continuing the tradition, finding that 116 articles on the Nature site specifically referenced the Beatles as of July 2025. The challenge of developing new drugs with better benefits than existing treatments is even known as the 'better than The Beatles' problem. Even NASA isn't immune, naming a research project on ice-cored hills called 'pingos' as Pingo STARR (SubTerranean Aquifer Reconnaissance and Reconstruction).