I would not want to put Ger Rijkers off from his comparative analysis of Dylan vs The Beatles [1], but when I looked at allusory titles in 2005 [2] I could find no allusions to Beatles’ titles, although I have not kept a record of which titles I searched on. I think he will find that most titles containing the words “strawberry” and “fields” are about fields of strawberries. I did not think of looking at Dylan titles.
Carl Gornitzki and colleagues remark that the number of Dylan articles has increased exponentially, and I think they are correct to suppose that one reason is that “More and more journal articles are published each year”. That is why, in the Shakespeare article and similar articles that I’ve written on the prevalence of words in PubMed® I have always scaled the number of articles to the index year or years. If Gornitzki scale their numbers, they may find that the increase is not exponential.
Rapid Response:
Possibly not exponential
I would not want to put Ger Rijkers off from his comparative analysis of Dylan vs The Beatles [1], but when I looked at allusory titles in 2005 [2] I could find no allusions to Beatles’ titles, although I have not kept a record of which titles I searched on. I think he will find that most titles containing the words “strawberry” and “fields” are about fields of strawberries. I did not think of looking at Dylan titles.
Carl Gornitzki and colleagues remark that the number of Dylan articles has increased exponentially, and I think they are correct to suppose that one reason is that “More and more journal articles are published each year”. That is why, in the Shakespeare article and similar articles that I’ve written on the prevalence of words in PubMed® I have always scaled the number of articles to the index year or years. If Gornitzki scale their numbers, they may find that the increase is not exponential.
1 www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6505/rr
2 Goodman NW. From Shakespeare to Star Trek and beyond: a Medline search for literary and other allusions in biomedical titles. BMJ 2005;331:1540-2
Competing interests: I have published similar articles.