Anyone who has spent some time excavating PubMed knows the feeling of drowning in published academic work. Researchers need to find appealing titles to increase the visibility of their work. This trend might be similar to the branding strategies at the supermarket shelf. To differentiate your product from a dozen of other similar offers, will you head for bright colors, a cool design or a minimalist approach?

For scientific papers, the sexy stuff has to be worked through the title, which should be both informative and appealing. Often, the choice has to been made between technicity and precision or personification and seduction. Would you rather read Protein X is Involved in the Complex Y for Activation of the Z Pathway in E. coli, or the alternative Trading Y to save the costs of Z signaling: is X a new player in the game?

To make things more digest, cross-referencing other domains (mythology, literature, cinema, conventional wisdom) is usually an efficient strategy.

Before going into details about paper naming, I will just present three examples to remind you that scientists have been importing cultural references to their field of study for many years. 

• Each time a scientist discovers a new organism, a name has to be given based on the binomial structure Genre species. Back in 1830, an entomologist might have used the Odyssey to describe the beetle Xylotrupes ulysses.  Nowadays, scientists are more daring and incorporate even pop culture references to their discoveries. Just have a look at the spider Heteropoda davidbowie.  
• Allusions are not reserved to zoologists and botanists. Proteins can demonstrate wittiness too. I recently discovered that Greek literature was involved in the processing of micro-RNAs through Argonaute proteins.
• Closer to new technologies, a quick dive in the literature regarding the development of algorithms in bioinformatics will tell you that scientists need no teaching regarding the a posteriori definition of acronyms. And this applies also to the writing of funding proposals and grants. To process genomic data, you might want to consider the use of RASQUAL, WASP, PatMaN, AUGUSTUS or PANDORA. The code underlaying these is much less fun than the name.

Let’s go back to the paper naming subject. To investigate cross-referencing, I decided to try a couple of words from the profane vocabulary before switching to masterpieces from classical literature or the Hollywoodian age.

I first picked an image widely used in poetry: the rainbow. If you look for articles in science that have this word in their title, you will end up on two categories: the first one deals with the rainbow trout, a great addition to your dining table. The second category is mostly using and reusing the catchphrase over the rainbow to describe a multitude of phenomenon: Over the rainbow: 25 years of confocal imaging or Over the rainbow to translational control to cite a few. Actually, the lexicon of the war is much more used than the poetic rainbow when we look at biology papers. Bacteria fight and cells compete. Tug of war (one of the faves) yields 515 results on PubMed. War and Peace yields 1030 results and not all of them are directly linked to Tolstoy [1,2].  Randomly, I add here another reference that I found interesting because it was cross-referencing a historical event, The Cold War, and the war lexicon.

To be fair with the community, these titles are mostly found in reviews or comments i.e. in papers where the author is supposed to convey part of their personal convictions coming from their research expertise. Nerdy cross-references also include Star Wars (molecular biology and sci-fi share the word clone and scientists are enjoying it) or Tolkien [3,4].

More surprising, popular movie references that are not a priori geeky or nerdy also exist. I found that the Godfather had left his footprint not only on gangster movies but also in cell molecular biology. And to conclude with this great movie, you have to read the portrait of J.C. Venter described through this prism. In all my random PubMed searches, it was eventually the cross-reference that I found the most in phase with its subject.