# Funny and odd scientific paper titles, and famous first lines

**What are the funniest and oddest scientific paper titles, and the most famous first lines in science?** The best-documented odd scientific paper titles include Dennis Upper's 1974 "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of 'writer's block'", a paper whose body is blank, and Smith and Pell's 2003 BMJ review finding no randomised trials of parachutes. Famous first lines include Turing's 1950 "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Each has a DOI anyone can check.

Published 2026-10-03 by EdCitation. https://edcitation.com/newsletter/odd-titles-and-famous-first-lines-in-science

The oddest page in science may be page 497 of the *Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis* for autumn 1974: a title, an author, a footnote, the heading References, and nothing else. The title is "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of 'writer's block'" (Upper, 1974). Funny scientific paper titles, weird ones and famous first lines are much shared, and often misquoted.

EdCitation publishes this guide. Every title, first line and number below was read in the paper, its publisher's record or a first-hand account on 3 October 2026. Stories with no traceable source are labelled unconfirmed, and our views are marked as ours.

Odd titles are also awkward to cite: records carry footnote markers, headings and nested quotation marks. EdCitation's free [Cite a source](https://edcitation.com/cite) builds each entry from the publisher's record, and the last sections show what it returned and what to fix. EdCitation never writes any part of anyone's work, and we say that with pride: it looks the reference up, and every sentence stays yours.

## What are the funniest and oddest scientific paper titles?

The best-documented include a blank paper on writer's block, a parachute review with nothing to review, vanishing teaspoons and a physics question answered "Probably not."

| Year | Title (shortened) | What makes it odd | Source |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1948 | The origin of chemical elements | The byline reads Alpher, Bethe, Gamow: alpha, beta, gamma | Alpher et al. (1948) |
| 1968 | Go to statement considered harmful | The editor wrote the title, and it became a template | Dijkstra (2001) |
| 1974 | The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block" | The body is blank | Upper (1974) |
| 2003 | Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge | A systematic review that found no trials | Smith and Pell (2003) |
| 2005 | The case of the disappearing teaspoons | 56 of 70 numbered teaspoons vanished | Lim et al. (2005) |
| 2011 | Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement? | The whole abstract: "Probably not." | Berry et al. (2011) |
| 2017 | Attention is all you need | A nod to a Beatles song, chosen in "five seconds" | Levy (2024) |
| 2020 | Will any crap we put into graphene increase its electrocatalytic effect? | Graphene doped with guano | Wang et al. (2020) |
| Yours | Any title in your list | Records add markers and headings | Rebuild it in [Cite a source](https://edcitation.com/cite) |

### The paper with nothing in it

Dennis Upper, of a Veterans Administration hospital in Massachusetts, published a title, a References heading and white space (Upper, 1974). The footnote says portions of the paper "were not presented" at a 1973 American Psychological Association convention. Reviewer A, whose comments are printed beneath, had studied it "with lemon juice and X-rays" and suggested a place "on the edge of a blank page".

In 2007 the journal printed a replication by five authors in four countries whose only text is an editor's note, a funding line ($2.50 of the first author's money) and one reference, to Upper. The editor, Patrick C. Friman, "did not change one word", a first in his tenure (Didden et al., 2007).

### A byline that spells a joke

Gamow added the physicist Hans Bethe to Alpher and Gamow's paper so it would be the "Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper", after the first three Greek letters (American Institute of Physics, n.d.). It appeared in *Physical Review* on 1 April 1948 (Alpher et al., 1948). The AIP quotes Bethe calling it "rather a nice joke".

### Parachutes and teaspoons

Smith and Pell (2003) searched four databases and "were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention", then invited the keenest advocates of evidence based medicine to volunteer for one. Yeh et al. (2018) ran a trial: 23 people randomised to a parachute or an empty backpack, no deaths or major injuries in either group, because every jump was from a stationary aircraft on the ground. Our [critique guide](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/how-to-write-a-critical-review-or-critique-of-an-article) reads it closely.

Lim et al. (2005) numbered 70 teaspoons in a research institute's tearooms: 56 (80%) disappeared within five months, a half-life of 81 days.

## Which paper titles became templates?

Two titles became templates: "considered harmful" (1968) and "all you need" (2017). The people involved told both stories.

### "Considered harmful": a title the editor wrote

Edsger Dijkstra submitted a paper called "A case against the goto statement". In a 2001 note, Dijkstra recalled that the editor of *Communications of the ACM*, Niklaus Wirth, made it a letter to the editor to speed publication and gave it "a new title of his own invention" (Dijkstra, 2001). It became "a template", with "X considered harmful" for almost any X, and Dijkstra regretted that many who cited it had "seen no more of it than its title". The publisher's record still files it under the letters heading (Dijkstra, 1968).

### "Attention is all you need"

The 2017 paper that proposed the Transformer architecture was named a couple of nights before its deadline. Llion Jones told *Wired* the title nodded to a Beatles song and "literally took five seconds of thought" (Levy, 2024). Its footnote reads "Listing order is random" (Vaswani et al., 2017), so even the order of its eight names is chance. More is in our [short history of machine writing](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/a-short-history-of-machine-writing).

## What are the most famous first lines in science?

The most quoted include Darwin's in 1859, Turing's question in 1950 and Miller's complaint about an integer in 1956; Watson and Crick's 1953 paper keeps its famous sentence for the end.

### Darwin, 1859

*On the Origin of Species* opens on a ship: "When on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist", Darwin noticed facts about the living things of South America (Darwin, 1859, p. 1). Its last sentence, on page 490, begins "There is grandeur in this view of life".

### Watson and Crick, 1953

"We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.)." So begins the two-page paper (Watson & Crick, 1953). Near the end comes the understatement: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated" suggests a copying mechanism for genetic material. *Nature*'s own summary on the article's page quotes "the specific pairing that we have postulated", one word longer than the printed page, which we checked in a scan. Quote from the paper, not from a page about it.

### Turing, 1950, and Miller, 1956

"I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" opens Turing's paper in *Mind* (Turing, 1950); the first section is headed The Imitation Game.

"My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer." The integer is seven, which, Miller (1956) adds, had followed Miller around for seven years.

## What is the shortest scientific paper?

No index keeps a record of the shortest scientific paper, so the title is claimed, not awarded. Three strong candidates:

- **Upper (1974)**: no body at all.
- **Lander and Parkin (1966)**: two sentences. A search on a CDC 6600 computer found 27⁵ + 84⁵ + 110⁵ + 133⁵ = 144⁵, four fifth powers summing to a fifth power, against a conjecture of Euler's. One reference.
- **Berry et al. (2011)**: the abstract in full is "Probably not." The body explores the idea, prompted by "recent measurements" of neutrinos apparently outrunning light, and finds the numbers against it.

## Do funny titles get cited more?

At first count, no; after allowing for which papers authors joke about, possibly yes.

- Heard et al. (2023) scored the humour of 2,439 titles in ecology and evolution. Funnier titles were cited less, but self-citation suggested that authors give funnier titles to papers they consider less important; corrected for that, citation rates roughly doubled from the least to the most humorous. Colons and question marks went with somewhat more citations, and title length had no effect.
- Letchford et al. (2015) took the 20,000 most cited papers of each year from 2007 to 2013 in Scopus, 140,000 in all: shorter titles went with more citations, weakly (Kendall's τ of −0.07 for 2010), and within journals only from 2007 to 2010.

Our view: both are correlations. Search engines read a title before people do, so name the subject first and joke second, as Upper did. Headlines follow other rules: see [how to write a headline](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/how-to-write-a-headline).

## How do you cite a paper with an odd title?

Build the entry from the publisher's record, then remove what the record adds that the printed title lacks.

1. **Start from the DOI**, not a list of funny titles, in [Cite a source](https://edcitation.com/cite).
2. **Watch for what the record adds.** Upper's record ends the title with a footnote marker, 1; Turing's starts with the article's number, "I." and a dash; Dijkstra's starts with a section heading, "Letters to the editor:". None of them belongs in the reference.
3. **Let the style turn inner quotation marks.** APA 7 does not quote an article title, so Upper's inner marks stay double; [MLA 9](https://edcitation.com/cite/mla) and Chicago quote the title, so they become single.
4. **Keep the question mark**, and in sentence case keep names capital, such as Euler's.
5. **Cite the edition you read**, with the original year for a classic: see [how to cite a book or ebook](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/how-to-cite-a-book-or-ebook).
6. **Check the list** in [Verify references](https://edcitation.com/verify-references), free: each entry comes back verified, "check this" or not found, retractions are flagged, and one that could not be checked is never shown as not found.

## How does EdCitation help you cite famous papers exactly?

We think Cite a source is the strongest tool for this job. Odd titles are the ones people retype from memory, and EdCitation never retypes: every entry is looked up in the publisher's record, never written. Give it a DOI, a title, a PubMed ID, an ISBN or a web address and it builds the entry in six styles, [APA 7](https://edcitation.com/cite/apa), MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver, and screens the source for retraction. It is free, with no account, as is [Find sources](https://edcitation.com/). Pro, at $8 a month, adds whole-file checks, Mechanics QA among them; Max, at $24, adds Theoretics QA and the Library ([pricing](https://edcitation.com/pricing)).

### Cite a source, run on papers named here

On 3 October 2026 Upper's DOI, 10.1901/jaba.1974.7-497a, came back from Crossref in APA 7 as:

> Upper, D. (1974). The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block.” *Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis*, *7*(3), 497. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1974.7-497a

The record's footnote marker is gone and the full stop sits inside the closing mark. MLA 9 turned the inner marks single, ‘Writer’s Block.’

Watson and Crick's DOI came back in APA 7 as "Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid," in sentence case as APA asks. Turing's came back as "Computing machinery and intelligence", without the record's "I." and dash, and Dijkstra's as "Go to statement considered harmful", without "Letters to the editor:". In MLA 9, Alpher, Bethe and Gamow became "Alpher, R. A., et al.", right for three authors, and the joke vanishes. Lander and Parkin's entry stood. No retraction was reported.

Gillian Beer's Oxford edition of the *Origin*, ISBN 9780199219223, came back from Open Library as "Darwin, C. (2008). *On the origin of species* (G. Beer, Ed.). Oxford University Press." Add the original year, 1859.

### Find sources, run once

[Find sources](https://edcitation.com/) searched "humorous titles of scientific articles and citations" and reported 2,791 results from OpenAlex. Heard et al. (2023) came first and its bioRxiv preprint fifth: cite the published version.

## What could not be confirmed?

- **"Delter".** The American Institute of Physics (n.d.) says Gamow urged Robert Herman to change his name to Delter and later credited a theory to "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow and Delter" in a journal it does not name. We could not find that paper.
- **The Beatles.** The title's origin rests on Jones's recollection to *Wired*.

## Quick questions

### What is the funniest scientific paper title?

No list is official. Our choice is Upper's 1974 "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of 'writer's block'", because the paper under it is blank.

### Who wrote "It has not escaped our notice"?

J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, near the end of their 1953 *Nature* paper on the structure of DNA. The printed words are "the specific pairing we have postulated", with no "that".

### Where does "considered harmful" come from?

From Dijkstra's 1968 letter "Go to statement considered harmful", whose title, Dijkstra recalled, the editor Niklaus Wirth chose.

### How do I cite a paper with a funny title in APA?

From its DOI, in sentence case with the title's own punctuation. EdCitation's free [Cite a source](https://edcitation.com/cite) builds it from the record; delete any footnote marker or heading the record adds.

## References

- Alpher, R. A., Bethe, H., & Gamow, G. (1948). The origin of chemical elements. *Physical Review*, *73*(7), 803–804. [https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.73.803](https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.73.803)
- American Institute of Physics. (n.d.). *Who was George Gamow?* Retrieved 3 October 2026, from [https://history.aip.org/exhibits/cosmology/ideas/gamow-joke.htm](https://history.aip.org/exhibits/cosmology/ideas/gamow-joke.htm)
- Berry, M. V., Brunner, N., Popescu, S., & Shukla, P. (2011). Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement? *Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical*, *44*(49), Article 492001. [https://doi.org/10.1088/1751-8113/44/49/492001](https://doi.org/10.1088/1751-8113/44/49/492001)
- Darwin, C. (1859). *On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life*. John Murray. [https://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F373&viewtype=text&pageseq=1](https://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F373&viewtype=text&pageseq=1)
- Didden, R., Sigafoos, J., O'Reilly, M. F., Lancioni, G. E., & Sturmey, P. (2007). A multisite cross-cultural replication of Upper's (1974) unsuccessful self-treatment of writer's block. *Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis*, *40*(4), 773. [https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2007.773](https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2007.773)
- Dijkstra, E. W. (1968). Go to statement considered harmful. *Communications of the ACM*, *11*(3), 147–148. [https://doi.org/10.1145/362929.362947](https://doi.org/10.1145/362929.362947)
- Dijkstra, E. W. (2001). *What led to "Notes on structured programming"* (EWD1308). University of Texas at Austin. [https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1308.html](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1308.html)
- Heard, S. B., Cull, C. A., & White, E. R. (2023). If this title is funny, will you cite me? Citation impacts of humour and other features of article titles in ecology and evolution. *FACETS*, *8*, 1–15. [https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2022-0079](https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2022-0079)
- Lander, L. J., & Parkin, T. R. (1966). Counterexample to Euler's conjecture on sums of like powers. *Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society*, *72*(6), 1079. [https://doi.org/10.1090/S0002-9904-1966-11654-3](https://doi.org/10.1090/S0002-9904-1966-11654-3)
- Letchford, A., Moat, H. S., & Preis, T. (2015). The advantage of short paper titles. *Royal Society Open Science*, *2*(8), Article 150266. [https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150266](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150266)
- Levy, S. (2024, March 20). 8 Google employees invented modern AI. Here's the inside story. *Wired*. [https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-modern-ai-transformers-paper/](https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-modern-ai-transformers-paper/)
- Lim, M. S. C., Hellard, M. E., & Aitken, C. K. (2005). The case of the disappearing teaspoons: Longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute. *BMJ*, *331*(7531), 1498–1500. [https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1498](https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1498)
- Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. *Psychological Review*, *63*(2), 81–97. [https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158](https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158)
- Smith, G. C. S., & Pell, J. P. (2003). Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: Systematic review of randomised controlled trials. *BMJ*, *327*(7429), 1459–1461. [https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1459](https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1459)
- Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. *Mind*, *LIX*(236), 433–460. [https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433](https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433)
- Upper, D. (1974). The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block." *Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis*, *7*(3), 497. [https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1974.7-497a](https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1974.7-497a)
- Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). *Attention is all you need* (Version 7). arXiv. [https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762](https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762)
- Wang, L., Sofer, Z., & Pumera, M. (2020). Will any crap we put into graphene increase its electrocatalytic effect? *ACS Nano*, *14*(1), 21–25. [https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184](https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184)
- Watson, J. D., & Crick, F. H. C. (1953). Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. *Nature*, *171*(4356), 737–738. [https://doi.org/10.1038/171737a0](https://doi.org/10.1038/171737a0)
- Yeh, R. W., Valsdottir, L. R., Yeh, M. W., Shen, C., Kramer, D. B., Strom, J. B., Secemsky, E. A., Healy, J. L., Domeier, R. M., Kazi, D. S., & Nallamothu, B. K. (2018). Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: Randomized controlled trial. *BMJ*, *363*, Article k5094. [https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094](https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094)