Science + wordplay = good times

In a recent blog on the Wall Street Journal site, Christopher Shea says:

Scientists and social scientists may not always produce lively prose, but they do have a way with titles. Or, in any case, they like to spice up their article heds with wordplay and occasionally groan-inducing pop-culture references. (You might be feeling loopy, too, if you’d been crunching numbers for months and dealing with reviewers’ pesky questions.)

Weirdexperiments.com has provided the service of identifying the movie titles that scientists most like to riff on, based on searches of Google Scholar. Coming in at No. 1 is “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” directed by Sergio Leone. It’s inspired, if that’s the word, such gems as “The Good, the Bad and the Whole Grain” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Cell Type-Specific Roles of Hypoxia Inducible Factor-1 in Neurons and Astrocytes.”

Read the full blog here.