Alice in the Wonderland of Science: Intertextual Figures in Scientific Articles

Abstract

Since numerous scientific and mathematical concepts can unsurprisingly be found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the book itself has been a great source of inspiration for many scientists. This paper gives an overview of how Alice finds her way into scientific articles. More precisely, it discusses intertextual figures that refer to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in a corpus of 29 scientific articles from disciplines including psychology, medicine or astrophysics. Results show that intertextual figures tend to be more explicit in the field of physics and medicine than those found in the field of psychology. Crucially, observations show that intertextual figures found in the collected scientific articles serve different purposes depending on the discipline that makes use of them.