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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren’t (natural) science

Mike Thelwall

Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK

Keywords: academic humor, disciplinary differences, journal article titles, poetic titles

a n o p e n a c c e s s

j o u r n a l

ABSTRACT

Citation: Thelwall, M. (2020). Pot, kettle:
Nonliteral titles aren’t (natural) science.
Quantitative Science Studies, 1(4),
1638–1652. https://doi.org/10.1162
/qss_a_00078

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00078

Received: 21 March 2020
Accepted: 27 May 2020

Corresponding Author:
Mike Thelwall
m.thelwall@wlv.ac.uk

Handling Editor:
Ludo Waltman

Researchers may be tempted to attract attention through poetic titles for their publications,
but would this be mistaken in some fields? Although poetic titles are known to be common in
medicine, it is not clear whether the practice is widespread elsewhere. This article investigates the
prevalence of poetic expressions in journal article titles from 1996–2019 in 3.3 million articles
from all 27 Scopus broad fields. Expressions were identified by manually checking all phrases
with at least five words that occurred at least 25 times, finding 149 stock phrases, idioms, sayings,
literary allusions, film names, and song titles or lyrics. The expressions found are most common
in the social sciences and the humanities. They are also relatively common in medicine, but
almost absent from engineering and the natural and formal sciences. The differences may reflect
the less hierarchical and more varied nature of the social sciences and humanities, where
interesting titles may attract an audience. In engineering, natural science, and formal science
fields, authors should take extra care with poetic expressions in case their choice is judged
inappropriate. This includes interdisciplinary research overlapping these areas. Conversely,
reviewers of interdisciplinary research involving the social sciences should be more tolerant of
poetic license.

INTRODUCTION

Journal article titles are a vital component of scholarship. They are likely to be the first thing read
during literature searches and journal browsing, potentially triggering an initial decision to read or
ignore the associated article. In addition, the words in the title form part of the indexing of the
article, affecting how it can be found through digital library searches. Titles may also give an
initial impression to reviewers, influencing their overall judgment. Because of these factors,
constructing an appropriate title is an important scholarly skill. In the context of the increasing
amount of interdisciplinary research and scholars that are not native English speakers (needing
training; Kuteeva & Negretti, 2016), it is useful to investigate different aspects of how article titles
may be constructed.

This article focuses on common poetic expressions in article titles. Poetic expressions can
attract attention but may create a negative impression if inappropriate for a field and may lose
a search audience if not keyword rich, and clichés may create a negative impression on readers
(Lindauer, 1968).

Despite the mainly biomedical investigations of standard title phrases (reviewed below), there
have been no science-wide studies of poetic or clichéd article titles yet, and all previous studies
have started with lists of candidate phrases (e.g., Shakespeare plays) rather than seeking evidence
about which phrases are common. These are important omissions because there is no theory-
driven reason yet to believe that one type of poetic expression would be more common, and there

The MIT Press

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are disciplinary differences in the way knowledge is constructed and written about (Hyland,
2012; Whitley, 2000). In particular, the natural sciences are more hierarchical (Kuteeva &
Airey, 2014) and the social sciences refer more to previous publications (Hyland, 1999). This
article addresses the interdisciplinary and list-based research gaps with a science-wide study
of common stock phrases extracted from science-wide article titles with a heuristic, and manual
checking rather than predefined lists.

IDIOMS AND POETIC LANGUAGE

Language can be analyzed from the artistic perspective of poetry. This form of writing uses a
variety of methods (poetic devices) to create meaning, rhythm, or mood. The many recognized
devices include idioms, alliteration, assonance, and allusion, as well as metaphor and simile,
all of which also occur in other types of text (Chovanec, 2008). A metaphor, allusion, or poetic
phrase is most powerful when first coined but weakens over time to become a cliché. Metaphors
eventually fall out of use or “die” (Alm-Arvius, 2006; Lakoff, 1987) by becoming an accepted
meaning (e.g., “I see what you mean” is no longer a metaphor for understanding; Geary, 2011).

Particularly relevant here, an allusion is a figure of speech that makes covert reference to
another object, forcing the reader to decode the connection (Perri, 1978). This object alluded
to could be a person or place, but it could also be another form of text, such as a popular song
lyric. The allusion might be central to the meaning or add an extra dimension (Leppihalme,
1997). Allusions do not seem to have been systematically studied in a way that is relevant
here, but other types of poetic device, and their use in academia, are discussed below.

2.1.

Idioms

Idioms have been studied from a linguistic perspective, such as to understand how language
works or to support natural language processing and language teaching. Although the concept
of an idiom is well known and previous investigations have distinguished between different types,
there is not an agreed definition (Espinal & Mateu, 2010; Nunberg, Sag, & Wasow, 1994). In
general, idioms are expressions that are commonly used as a single unit and have a figurative
meaning. Although the meanings of many idioms are unrelated to the individual words (e.g.,
“Bob’s your uncle” in British English suggests that success is assured), more conventional idioms
have a literal meaning that is related to their figurative meaning (e.g., “close to the bone”). An
expression can become idiomatic when it continues to be used after its original meaning has been
forgotten (e.g., “Bob” above was probably nepotistic 19th-century British politician Robert Cecil).
A recent study suggests that modifying idiomatic phrases that are usually fixed does not obscure
their meaning (Kyriacou, Conklin, & Thompson, 2019), and this device may lengthen the life of
an idiom when appropriately used.

Idioms are a type of multiword expression (Huening & Shlucker, 2015) and a type of colloca-
tion: a sequence of words occurring more often than statistically expected (Clear, 1993).
Nonidiomatic multiword expressions may still have idiosyncratic elements, such as employing
one or more archaic words or meanings (e.g., “spick and span,” “stand and deliver”).

An irreversible binomial expression is a common type of multiword expression. It is a fixed-
order sequence of two words or groups of words with the same part of speech (e.g., both verbs
or both adjectives), connected by “or” or “and.” Irreversible binomials are often alliterative (e.g.,
“to have and to hold,” “short and sweet”) or rhyming (e.g., “high and dry”), thus injecting them
with a poetic element that presumably contributes to their widespread use. Some, but not all,
irreversible binomials are also idioms (e.g., “rich and famous” vs. “do or die”).

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2.2. Sayings, Proverbs, Aphorisms, and Clichés

Proverbs are “short sentences of wisdom” (Mieder, 2004, p. 3) that are well known and have
persisted in a cultural context, such as “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Due to their short nature,
they are susceptible to incorporation within sentences or titles. In contrast, an aphorism is a
memorable concise expression of a general truth, possibly with an element of metaphor, such
as “all that glitters is not gold” (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000). More generally, a saying can
be defined as any memorable concise expression. These are not poetic devices but are poetic
language in the more general sense.

A recognizable expression can be refreshed or injected with humor by modifying it in various
ways, including by shortening, substituting individual words or putting it in a novel context
(Vrbinc & Vrbinc, 2011).

A cliché is a figurative expression that is perceived as being overused and that is likely to drop
from common usage as a result (Lindauer, 1968). Clichés can generate a bad impression,
including in academic writing, and this may extend to common stylistic expressions (Deb,
Dey, & Balas, 2019).

2.3. Poetic Language in Academia

Previous studies have noted the prevalence of song lyrics in journal article titles, employing the
poetic device of allusion. Some prior studies have also analyzed poetic or idiomatic language in
other academic contexts.

An analysis of idiomatic expressions in 152 transcribed spoken academic texts from a U.S.
university between 1997 and 2001 found that many were commonly used and would be helpful
for second language learners to understand. These included, “chicken-and-egg,” “the big
picture,” and “in a nutshell” (Simpson & Mendis, 2003), which would presumably add interest
to a lecture but might be too informal for routine use in journal articles.

One reasonably discipline-specific analysis of journal articles investigated the use of figurative
language in articles about the cloning of the sheep Dolly (Giles, 2001). It found extensive use of
many types, including metaphor, cliché and hyperbole, but not an agreed central metaphor for
the issue.

Poetic language can become deeply embedded in some disciplines. In computer science,
metaphors are essential to help convey complex abstract concepts (Colburn & Shute, 2008), such
as “bag of words” for the unordered set of all words in a text (also used in computational
linguistics). Metaphors in common use include Windows (function metaphor), menu (function
metaphor), email (function metaphor), and mouse (appearance metaphor). In addition, computer
scientists (both academic and nonacademic) sometimes adopt apparently playful names, such as
relating to animals. The many examples include Python (programming language; primarily
alluding to Monty Python’s Flying Circus1), GNU (recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”),
bug (metaphor for programming error), Gopher (metaphor for search helper), Panther (Apple
operating system codename), and ASP (Active Server Pages). Spam was originally a playful
computer science allusion to a Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy sketch from 1970. It has
become a serious term and literal description with its own academic conferences (Conference on
Email and Anti-Spam: CEAS) and is mentioned in many paper titles (e.g., “Web spam detection
using SVM classifier”).

1 https://docs.python.org/2/faq/general.html#why-is-it-called-python

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Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren’t (natural) science

Other fields may also inject humor or interest through names when a new object is created or
identified. Physics examples arguably include strangeness, charm, and flavor (of quark). In
biology, animal names include the fried egg jellyfish, the Hebejeebie plant genus and the Aha
ha wasp. Chemical compound names with allusions include the proteins ranasmurfin (Smurfs),
pikachurin (Pikachu), and sonic hedgehog. Black swan theory in economics uses a literary
allusion. In architecture, there are moon, pigtail, and roving bridges. Information science
allusions include sleeping beauty (now delayed recognition) and Matthew effect (also known
as rich-get-richer). These cases all seem to serve the purpose of making the named object
memorable or attracting attention to it or the associated documentation.

2.4. Article Titles

Journal article titles have been previously studied mainly for their abstract informational value
(Diener, 1984). Statistical analyses of various fields have found a range of title-related factors
to associate with increased citation impact. These factors include the title length (cf. Didegah
& Thelwall, 2013) and specific acronyms, with negative factors including country names and
questions, and factors that could be positive or negative (depending on the study) including
the presence of a colon (Jacques & Sebire, 2010; Jamali & Nikzad, 2011). Questions in titles
may also be used to attract an audience (Ball, 2009; Cook & Plourde, 2016), as may titles that
do not overlap with an article’s keywords (Rostami, Mohammadpoorasl, & Hajizadeh, 2014). A
study of many title properties for management science found two to have a small association with
citation counts (Nair & Gibbert, 2016). It is difficult to justify a cause-and-effect relationship for
these factors, although it seems reasonable that articles with country names tend to be less cited
because they have a more specific focus. There are disciplinary differences in the construction of
titles, including their average length and the proportion of substantive (content-bearing) words
(Nagano, 2015), as well as the use of colons (Hartley, 2007). There are also disciplinary differ-
ences and historical evolutions in the lengths and structure of titles (Milojevic(cid:1), 2017). In the social
sciences, the nationality of authors may influence their titles (Kim, 2015). Quotes from survey or
interview respondents may also be used in titles (Pułaczewska, 2009). These all may perform the
similar function of attracting attention.

Poetic language is sometimes used in article titles. In the biomedical literature, the use of
Shakespearean quotes (e.g., “To be or not to be”), film titles (e.g., “Back to the future”), and fairy
stories (e.g., “The Emperor’s New Clothes”) in article titles increased between 1950–54 and
2000–04 (Goodman, 2005). Biomedical clichés subsequently found include state of the art, gold
standard, paradigm shift/s/ing, cutting edge, outside the box, wind/s of change, coalface,
goalposts, and playing field (Goodman, 2012). Bob Dylan lyrics can also be found in the biomed-
ical literature (e.g., “Like a rolling histone: epigenetic regulation of neural stem cells and brain
development by factors controlling histone acetylation and methylation”), partly as the result of a
bet in Sweden (Gornitzki, Larsson, & Fadeel, 2015). Bob Dylan songs are also exploited by
meteorologists (Brown, Aplin, et al., 2016). Numerous medical papers have taken advantage
of the acronym of the National Institute for (Health and) Clinical Excellence to make clever titles
(e.g., “The NICE cost-effectiveness threshold”; Morrison & Batty, 2009), and sex-related titles
seem to gain extra readers (Langdon-Neuner, 2008).

There is mixed evidence on whether attempts at poetic titles tend to be successful. Medical
papers with clichés in their title seem more likely to be rejected (Gjersvik, Gulbrandsen, et al.,
2013). In psychology, articles with titles rated amusing by human judges tend to be more cited
(Subotic & Mukherjee, 2014). In contrast, a Biological Conservation editorial argued that title
characteristics have little impact on citation rates in the journal (Costello, Beard, et al., 2019).

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Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren’t (natural) science

3. METHODS

Common poetic expressions of all types discussed above were sought by extracting word n-grams
from all Scopus article titles 1996–2019. Before counting, all words were converted to lowercase
and punctuation was removed. Titles were split at colons or full stops to prevent the end of one
phrase from being merged with the start of another. The following rules were used to select a can-
didate list of common expressions.

(cid:129) The n-gram must contain at least five (consecutive) words. This is a practical step to

produce a manageable list of phrases to check.

(cid:129) The n-gram must occur in at least 25 titles. This is again a practical step to produce a

manageable list of phrases to check.

(cid:129) The n-gram must not be part of a longer n-gram that occurs at least 50% as often. This is

a heuristic to focus on the longest form of an expression.

This procedure is available in the free software Webometric Analyst (lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk in the
submenu: Tab-sep/Count frequency of texts or words in column/Find longest Ngrams in text or
column, then selecting the title column).

I manually checked the 152,928 n-grams found to seek phrases that were poetic, excluding
noun phrases and nonpoetic common phrases (e.g., “The purpose of this article is to”). I subjec-
tively judged a phrase as poetic if it appeared to use words that were unnecessary to convey the
meaning succinctly and clearly. This included the use of extra words, unusual words (e.g., “tale”
as an old-fashioned word for story, “kids” as an informal word for children, “you” as an unlikely
personal pronoun), or idioms. It also included phrases that seemed unlikely to be widely useful in
academic research at face value (e.g., “on the road to a”).

The judgments were time consuming and error prone due to the length of the task and the pos-
sibility of poetic phrases from cultural contexts unknown to me. Even though I almost certainly
missed some poetic phrases (in addition to shorter expressions that were excluded by design), the
phrases found represent a large enough set to allow disciplinary comparisons. The full list of n-grams
can be found online (https://figshare.com/articles/Ngrams_and_figures_for_Funny_titles_aren_t
_natural_science/12016278). This subjective method was chosen in preference to the approach
used in previous quantitative studies that matched titles to predefined candidate lists (e.g.,
Shakespeare quotes, Queen lyrics) to avoid predetermining the types of phrases that might be found.
Identifying modified idiomatic phrases automatically is challenging (Weber, Fischer, & Dormeyer,
2007). An advantage of this approach is its ability to detect modified phrases, such as “to screen or
not to screen.” Nevertheless, it has the substantial alternative limitation of subjectivity. In particular,
the sources of phrases might be misinterpreted due to a lack of knowledge of subject-specific canon-
ical texts, or of texts not known to a person of my cultural background and experiences (e.g.,
most U.S. country music, songs originally not in English, traditional Chinese sayings, classical
music). This is particularly likely for phrases that have a plausible surface meaning coupled with
an allusion (e.g., “the curious case of the”).

After the initial detection of apparently poetic phrases, the selected n-grams were re-examined
to make a consistent decision about whether a phrase was poetic or just standardized. Some
phrases were at the borderline and judgment was needed. These decisions were made before
any analyses so that the results could not influence disciplinary differences. For example, “a race
to the bottom” was kept but “a view from the trenches” was rejected. The latter was repeatedly
used in the specific context of an article or column describing the practitioner perspective,
making it seem (to me) to be a standardized title-specific expression rather than a less predictably
used expression that readers might not expect to see in an article title.

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The titles of articles containing the initially selected phrases were examined and the phrases
were rejected when most articles were about associated works (e.g., “The picture of Dorian
Grey,” “The turn of the screw,” “The lord of the rings,” “Their eyes were watching god”) or when
the phrase did not seem to be poetic within its discipline (e.g., “across the tree of life,” “doing
well by doing good” [a business concept]). After the filtering, 149 common poetic phrases
remained.

For additional context, the 149 phrases were classified into several types, according to their
(guessed) most common use, as defined here. These include literary or cultural allusions, idioms,
and proverbial expressions. Approximate matches were allowed when the modifications were
judged to be alluding to the unmodified form (e.g., “a tale of two cultures,” presumably derived
from, “A tale of two cities”).

(cid:129) Literary allusion: A book, poem or play title or quote (e.g., Shakespeare).
(cid:129) Film: The name of a film. No film quotes were identified (e.g., “You’re gonna need a bigger

boat”), but would have been included.

(cid:129) Music: A musical title or song lyric.
(cid:129) Saying: A well-known English proverbial phrase.
(cid:129) Stock phrase: A common idiom or other phrase that is neither proverbial nor an allusion.

In many cases a phrase could be in multiple classes. For example, most of the phrases are prob-
ably in book titles if relatively unknown volumes are included. Some phrases were apparently
variations on well-known phrases and were classified according to the type of the associated
phrase (e.g., “to eat or not to eat” as a variation of “to be or not to be”; other phrases alluded to
a book title, such as “A tale of three cities” as a variation on “A tale of two cities”). Others omitted
a key word but kept the structure of an associated phrase (e.g., “the dark side of the [moon],”
[the king/queen] is dead, long live the [king/queen]”).

The relative prevalence of poetic phrases across disciplines was assessed by calculating the
percentage of articles in each Scopus broad category (n = 27) with the phrases in their titles.
Articles classified in more than one broad category were counted fractionally. For example, an
article in two broad categories would count as 0.5 articles for both. The same fractional count-
ing procedure was used for the number of matching phrases and the number of articles in each
category. Eight phrases were selected to report in detail for additional context.

4. RESULTS

The 149 common phrases were contained in between 25 and 477 article titles. The article titles
sometimes used the phrases in a context in which they were accurate descriptions, with the
poetry deriving from the choice of language. For example, titles including the phrase “a tale of
two cities” typically involved a comparison between two geographic locations (often cities). The
phrase is the title of a Charles Dickens novel; otherwise “a tale” would be old-fashioned and in-
appropriate for a journal article not focusing on a story narrative.

The extent to which the 149 poetic phrases occur in the 27 Scopus broad fields varies greatly
(Figure 1). While more than 1 in 900 articles contain one of them in six broad fields, they occur in
less than 1 in 29,000 Materials Science journal articles. At the extreme difference level, they are
44 times more likely to occur in a Social Sciences article title than in a Materials Science article
title, although they are rare in both. The delineations follow the Scopus Social Sciences and Arts
and Humanities categories, although there may well be substantial variation within them. The

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Figure 1. The percentage of Scopus-indexed journal articles 1996–2019 containing one of the 149
poetic phrases identified by Scopus broad category. All counting is fractional for articles in multiple
broad fields.

data behind the figures can be found online (https://figshare.com/articles/Ngrams_and_figures
_for_Funny_titles_aren_t_natural_science/12016278).

Many different stock phrases were reasonably common (Figure 2). The origins are varied,
from commercial (“does one size fit all,” “two for the price of one”) to biblical (“in search of
the holy grail”), Christian weddings (“till death do us part”; also a UK TV show as Till death us
do part), and light metaphors (“a seat at the table”). Some may be influenced by television
program names (“who wants to be a [millionaire]”) or TV catchphrases (“2 for the price of
1” in The price is right), or less well-known songs (Abba: “Two for the price of one”).

The literary allusions (Figure 3) are full or partial book titles (including plays), famous quotes
from books (or plays, usually Shakespeare), and word play variations of them. One of the books is
a ground-breaking popular 1963 children’s story ( Where the wild things are) and one is over
2,500 years old (The tortoise and the hare). The only post-1996 book is “Catch me if you can,”
but this is perhaps more famous as a film, and the phrase was in common use before this (e.g.,
a 1969 film, songs, and a 1965 play).

There seemed to be only three film titles included (Figure 4), including “how I learned to stop
worrying and love [the bomb],” which is associated with the film Dr Strangelove. The phrase
“what are they good for” seems to be a play on the Motown song War, containing the chorus,

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Figure 2. Stock phrases with at least five words in Scopus journal article titles 1996–2019.

“War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!” The Tina Turner song “What’s love got to do with
it” is in twice, once for the apparently truncated part “got to do with it.” This was commonly used
in the title phrase, “What’s [x] got to do with it,” where [x] is the topic of the article. One short
phrase seems to be an allusion to a Pink Floyd album, “The dark side of the [moon],” although this
could be a coincidence, as it could also be a plain description. Two phrases may be influenced by
pop group New Kids on the Block (active 1985–1994), although this is a common expression.

Many common sayings are widely used, including with several variations (Figure 5). Some are
incomplete sayings, but allude to the original sentence (e.g., “more than one way to [skin a cat],”
“[beauty] is in the eye of the beholder”).

Eight selected expressions were investigated further for background information on use contexts.

These expressions were chosen nonrandomly to illustrate a range of different types.

(cid:129) Two sides of the same coin: This traditional saying was commonly used to express some-
thing with positive and negative aspects in the social sciences and medicine. In Education,
an example title is, “Competences for learning to learn and active citizenship: Different
currencies or two sides of the same coin?.” In Medicine, the articles seemed to be

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Figure 3. Literary allusions with at least five words in Scopus journal article titles 1996–2019.

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overviews, short reports, or case studies rather than primary research (“Tumor dormancy
and cancer stem cells: two sides of the same coin?”). An example of a rare life sciences use
is, “Overexpression of protein phosphatase 5 in the mouse heart: Reduced contractility but
increased stress tolerance—Two sides of the same coin?”.

(cid:129) Between a rock and a hard place: This saying started 28 articles (not in a series) in the
Sociology and Political Science narrow field (part of Social Science; “Between a rock and a
hard place: Radical Islam in post-Suharto Indonesia”). It is used in political contexts when
there are problems with only difficult options. No titles used the phrase literally, with
“Between a rock and a hard place: Environmental and engineering considerations when
designing coastal defence structures” being the closest.

(cid:129) The good, the bad, and the ugly: This Italian Spaghetti Western movie title suggests a study
with three relevant factors, with one positive, one negative, and one very negative. In
Medicine, the phase seemed to be used in nonprimary research general articles (“The good,
the bad and the ugly of federal health care reform”). Articles sometimes explicitly referred to
three things in the title (“The good, the bad and the ugly: Three faces of social media usage by
local governments”) or abstract (“The ‘good,’ the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly’? views on male teachers
in foundation phase education” referred to liked, disliked, and threatening teachers). For
other papers, the metaphor is not strongly enough tied to the content of the paper to be

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Figure 4.
article titles 1996–2019.

Song (bottom) or film (top) titles or allusions with at least five words in Scopus journal

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Figure 5. Sayings with at least five words in Scopus journal article titles 1996–2019.

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understandable from the abstract (e.g., the abstract of “Big data for policy analysis: The good,
the bad, and the ugly” only mentions the existence of positive and negative factors).

(cid:129) The elephant in the room: This saying apparently originated with a 19th-century Russian
fable. The matching titles of papers were implicit arguments that an aspect of the paper is well
known but avoided as a topic of discussion or research (“Lateral violence: Calling out the
elephant in the room,” “Race and research in the southern United States: Approaching the
elephant in the room,” “The elephant in the room: Poverty, disability, and employment”).
(cid:129) Old wine in new bottles: This saying (with biblical origins) might suit the title of an article
assessing whether something is a new development or essentially the same as before, and
was useful for political contexts (“Old wine in new bottles? The 1999 Finnish election
campaign on the internet,” “Old Wine in New Bottles? What is the Tea Party and Where
Did it Come From?”), including for social geography (“Human development—new para-
digm or old wine in new bottles?”).

(cid:129) Out of sight out of mind: This traditional saying was used when a topic involved forget-
ting as a component, particularly in medicine (“Foot trauma due to foreign bodies—Out of
sight, out of mind?”), or ignoring something (“Out of sight, out of mind: How Harvard
University exploited rural Chinese villagers for their DNA”), but also in sociology and
psychiatry (“Out of sight, out of mind: Workplace smoking bans and the relocation of
smoking at work”).

(cid:129) The long and winding road: This Beatles song is used to emphasize the length of time
needed for a project (“The long and winding road. Arriving at safe medication manage-
ment in LTC setting,” “The long and winding road to personalized glycemic control in
the Intensive Care Unit”), but sometimes to refer to twisting (“Epidural catheters: The long
and winding road”).

(cid:129) One step forward two steps back: This Desert Rose Band song title is used to highlight that
some progress has been made but the situation has gotten worse, particularly in a political
context (“One step forward, two steps back: Success and failure in recent Turkish foreign
policy,” “One step forward, two steps back: The political culture of corruption and
cleanups in Nigeria”). A reviewer of this article pointed out that this is the title of a book
by Lenin, which is the probable motivation behind its use within most or all article titles in
politics. This shows the importance of subject-specific knowledge in making interpreta-
tions and that some of my classifications are at least partly wrong. In this case, other
uses seemed unlikely to be politics-motivated (e.g., “Pre-operative staging of breast
cancer with breast MRI: One step forward, two steps back?,” “One step forward, two
steps back—Will there ever be an AIDS vaccine?,” and “One step forward, two steps
back: Arguing for a transatlantic investor protection regime”), so this phrase probably
has multiple motivations.

5. DISCUSSION

This paper is limited by the focus on common poetic phrases and analyzes their prevalence rather
than their effectiveness. Paper titles may also be poetic or idiomatic through modified quotes
(“You probably think this paper’s about you: Narcissists’ perceptions of their personality and rep-
utation,” “miR miR on the wall, who’s the most malignant medulloblastoma miR of them all?,”
“Fantastic yeasts and where to find them: The hidden diversity of dimorphic fungal pathogens”),
rarer phrases (“Love will tear us apart: Transformational leadership and love in a call centre”),
cursing (“Fk yea I swear: Cursing and gender in MySpace”), greatly modified poetic phrases
(“Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?”), and jokes
(“Factitious diarrhea: A case of watery deception,” “HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, Flickr,

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academic article, to read”). Thus, poetic phrases may be far more common and with different
disciplinary variations than the relatively standardized versions found here. In addition, poetic
metaphors can be shorter or even a single word (e.g., cuckoo), but it was impractical to check
shorter phrases. As mentioned in Section 3, the manual checking stage is subjective and will have
missed some poetic phrases. This may have influenced the conclusions from the results if poetic
phrases from the natural sciences and engineering were substantially more likely to be over-
looked. This might have happened if these subjects made relatively more frequent reference to
areas of specialty or cultural knowledge unknown to the current article’s author.

The results show that poetic phrases of multiple types are widely used across academic fields.
This reveals, for the first time, that such phrases are relatively common in the social sciences and
humanities, and confirm that some are common in medicine (Goodman, 2005, 2012; Gornitzki
et al., 2015). Despite previous studies mainly focusing on biomedical research, however, the 149
stock phrases analyzed here are far more common in social sciences, arts, and humanities
(Figure 1). The results also demonstrate that medium or long poetic phrases are rare in the natural
sciences, formal sciences, and engineering. Unless other types of poetic phrase (e.g., shorter,
more heavily modified) do not follow this trend, it seems that the social sciences, arts, and
humanities are the natural home of poetic title phrases and that they are comparatively absent
from the natural sciences, formal sciences, and engineering.

This study has not analyzed structural considerations behind poetic language use, such as
whether colons are frequently used to separate nonliteral and literal segments of tiles, whether
journals with stricter refereeing are less likely to accept them, or whether their use has increased
over time. Information about these would give deeper insights into the phenomenon.

There are many possible causes of the apparent disciplinary differences in the prevalence of
poetic titles. The relative abundance of poetic phrases in the social sciences and humanities
journal titles may be influenced by journal guidelines, advice (e.g., Norman, 2012; Rossi &
Brand, 2020), or instructions (e.g., maximum title lengths). Three possible major causes are
discussed below, starting with the one that seems to be the most important.

A greater need to generate engaging titles to attract an audience: In more linear science fields,
papers may tend to be adding pieces to the jigsaw of the field, so people needing the information
will find it by appropriate keyword searches (e.g., “Increasing the illumination slowly over several
weeks protects against light damage in the eyes of the crustacean Mysis relicta”). In other areas, the
knowledge may be optional rather than essential (e.g., “‘What’s love got to do with it?’ The expe-
rience of love in person-product relationships,” “Intellectuals and power, or, what’s love got to do
with it?”), and so engaging a browsing audience is more important. This is also the case for news-
paper headlines or magazine titles, for example, which often use puns or other humor to attract
attention (Alexander, 1986; Chovanec, 2005; Monsefi & Mahadi, 2016). The increased use of ques-
tion marks in natural and life sciences over a decade ago has been attributed to an increasing need
to market articles, however (Ball, 2009), but a greater proportion of social science articles might
benefit from active marketing through titles. Related to this, in the social sciences, the diversity
of human experience means that a theory cannot be comprehensively evaluated but can be tested
in many different environments. In this situation, the author needs to make the case for the inter-
estingness of the environment examined to attract an audience, given that their contribution is un-
likely to be individually vital to the theory. Incorporating an interesting quote in the title is another
common strategy to achieve this goal (e.g., “Recommended for you” in Hallinan & Striphas, 2016).

A greater perceived freedom to experiment with article titles: Historically developed disci-
plinary norms, perhaps influenced by the factors above, may be considered to be transgressed
if a title is not literal enough. For example, the inclusion of a pun may suggest that the article is

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less scientific and more like a magazine article. Closely related to this, new scholars may attempt
to imitate current article title styles (Nagano, 2015), perhaps avoiding humor if they do not find
evidence that this would be acceptable.

A lesser need to succinctly summarize the contents of an article: Social sciences and human-
ities findings may be discursive or not easily summarized, whereas in the natural sciences and
some areas of medicine, simple summarizations are possible (e.g., “Spectral sensitivity of single
photoreceptor cells in the eyes of the ctenid spider Cupiennius salei Keys,” “Colony-stimulating
factor-1 injections improve but do not cure skeletal sclerosis in osteopetrotic (op) mice”).

6. CONCLUSION

Although the results are subjective to my cultural and subject knowledge, the apparent relative
scarcity of standard poetic phases in the natural sciences, formal sciences, and engineering sug-
gests that their use is against disciplinary norms in these areas. This does not prove that their use
should be avoided because (a) the methods used here are not exhaustive, (b) it is possible that
reviewers would be more receptive to the novelty of poetic or nonliteral titles in fields where they
are scarce, and (c) no evidence is available about the perception of poetic expressions in any
field. Nevertheless, academia is imitative and tribal through disciplinary cultures (Becher &
Trowler, 2001; Hyland, 2012). Reviewers and readers may therefore judge disciplinary compe-
tence partly through adherence to writing style norms. Authors in relevant fields should therefore
be particularly cautious when considering a common poetic phrase for their article titles, in case
readers and reviewers form a negative judgment and their less keyword-rich title is less findable to
other scholars. Of course, reviewers should be forgiving of authors that are not native English
speakers using a poetic expression without realizing that it is a cliché.

A likely cause of the disciplinary differences is a greater need to attract an audience in the
social sciences, arts, and humanities due to their inherent variety and nonhierarchical nature.
This suggests that the construction of an engaging title is particularly important for authors in these
areas, who should also consider alternative strategies, such as interesting quotes and questions
(Ball, 2009; Cook & Plourde, 2016).

Finally, while the 149 poetic phrases analyzed here occur in about 0.1% of Social Sciences
articles, when added to more ad hoc idiomatic or poetic phrases, it seems likely that poetic titles
are a rhetorical device that reviewers and readers would often recognize as an accepted strategy
in this area. Nevertheless, clichés may alienate part of the audience. In this context, novel poetic
expressions might give the best of both worlds.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The author has no competing interests.

FUNDING INFORMATION

This research was not funded.

DATA AVAILABILITY

The data used for the graphs and the complete lists of n-grams, including those judged to be
literal, is at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12016278.

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