From Shakespeare to Star Trek and beyond: a Medline search for literary and other allusions in biomedical titles

Abstract

Objectives To document biomedical paper titles containing literary and other allusions. Design Retrospective survey.

Familiarity breeds: clichés in article titles

“…2 That is fine, but please can we have some imagination, to stir our senses ('Where the rubber meets the road: a cyclist's guide to teaching professionalism' 8 ), rather than repetition ('Thinking outside the box: using metastasis suppressors as molecular tools' (reference suppressed) to erode our enthusiasm. …”

“…nih.gov/pubmed) in August 2011 using methods similar to a previous search for literary allusions. 2 I thought of possible clichés and searched 5-year periods with the limit of titles of articles published in English. I used wild cards and Boolean operators as appropriate, for example, 'paradigm AND (shift* OR shifting)'.…”

Titles in Veterinary Medicine research articles

“…Singh, Chaudhary and Suvirya (2009) examined dermatology samples to study the divergence between the title and the body of the article; Goodman (2000Goodman ( & 2005 surveyed the use of active verbs in clinical reports and allusions to Shakespeare's plays, to Andersen's tales, to the Bible, to popular proverbs and films; Siegel, Thacker, Goodman and Gillespie (2006) highlighted the information provided by titles on the topic, the methods, the datasets, the results or the conclusions; Giannoni (2008) discussed titles in medical editorials published in Italian and in English journals; whereas Wang and Bai (2007) examined nominal-group titles.…”

Dårlig tittel – dårlig manus?

“…en tittel som gjengir studiens konklusjon eller viktigste funn (12). Andre forfattere har studert bruken av litteraere ord og vendinger (13,14), kolon (15), ordet «the» (16) og humor (17) i titler.…”