The incidence of 11 movie titles in the titles of Scopus-indexed papers

As a purely academic exercise of interest, and spurred by a curious debate in a blog entry over a decade ago, the purpose of this paper was to appreciate the incidence of select movie (film) titles in the titles of papers indexed in Scopus. Using 11 of the first 20 titles of a top 100 list of movie classics at the “Rotten Tomatoes” website, we assessed (January 2024) how frequently they appeared in the titles of those papers. While the vast majority of movie titles referred to the movie (or book version) itself, except for “The Wizard of Oz”, which had 74.6% positive results for a software with this name, we found that some authors may have employed such titles to draw attention to their papers because readers would likely to be drawn to them due to familiarity with the movie title, or name recognition. To test this hypothesis, we assessed citation counts relative to the average of other papers published in the same journals and in the same years, finding that 83% of the 95 papers assessed had lower citation counts than the average of papers published in the same journal and in the same year. We also considered the ethics of the verbatim use of movie titles, especially of movies that may be copyrighted, when quotation marks are not used, or the absence of a note within the paper itself to indicate the source of the title’s inspirational wording. Although we are cognizant of several limitations to this study, which serves as an initial springboard for additional future multidisciplinary studies, we suggest some additional research ideas to popularize the intersection between film studies, basic academic sciences, bibliometrics, and publishing.