Let’s turn to slightly less fraught subjects than Long Covid, failure rates for vital clinical trials, dread diseases and so on. You know, the usual menu of cheerfulness around here. Instead, let’s look at a topic whose importance has somehow been obscured until now: does giving your research paper a funny title lead to it being cited more?

This study says that yes, it probably will. But you might be wondering how this was quantified. Turns out that the authors used a volunteer panel to rate the humorous effect of the titles of over 2400 papers in the fields of ecology and evolution, and then correlated those rankings with the number of citations. That’s been a source of criticism of the conclusions, and it’s hard to say that the critics are off base. Humor is widely accepted to be wildly subjective and context-dependent, and let’s just say that academic/scientific humor is not the most robust stand of flowers in the gardens of amusement. Some readers will remember the Journal Of Irreproducible Results, a scientific humor publication that has lasted (more or less) for decades with many twists and turns and periods of obscurity. Its articles could hit the mark from time to time, but to my taste (subjectivity again) its authors often suffered from what was apparently an irresistible temptation to beat the joke to death with a stick, for pages and pages. Trying for a funny title at least enforces brevity. But I should also note the by-now-a-cliché academic habit, which is even more common in the humanities and social sciences, of the double-barrelled title, as in “Weird Attention-Getting Phrase: Followed by the Actual Title of the Work”. Plenty of not-so-wonderful jokes and pop culture references sneak in that way.

Even if the volunteers were sometimes rating attempted humor rather than actual humor, though, the citation effect might be real. The preprint notes that authors seem to assign the humorous titles to shorter and less important papers, which seems about right, and that the increased citation effect really only shows up when you correct for that effect as well. And that’s not exactly a quantitative measurement, either, although I can see how you’d roughly sort these out. It does seem likely that authors would be unwilling to stick a groan-inducing pun on a big manuscript, though, doesn’t it? And on that topic, we also have headline writers and the text of abstracts to deal with. Nature seems to like giving breezy throwaway joke headlines for its News and Views articles, which is fine as far as it goes, but often there’s no text other than that headline in an RSS feed. Which isn’t too useful, if all you have is something like “A study too far” or “Stretching for significance” to go on. There was an era a few years ago when someone at Angewandte Chemie tried to work in as many bizarre puns and odd references into the English-language abstracts as possible, but gradually I realized that they must have left, and none of these were showing up any more. At least you could see the whole abstract! That shift roughly coincided with their apparent decision to publish about eight times as many articles as they used to, so I can see how it would have been a strain to keep up the wit.

Readers are invited to list their favorite (or least favorite!) joke titles in the comments – there have been several outbursts of this sort of thing on Twitter, but let’s see if people have some to add! My own contribution is this one, on the evolutionary history of lice in primates. “Pair of lice lost, or parasites regained” does get my admiration, I have to say.