  Researchers may be tempted to attract attention through poetic titles for
their publications, but would this be mistaken in some fields? Whilst poetic
titles are known to be common in medicine, it is not clear whether the practice
is widespread elsewhere. This article investigates the prevalence of poetic
expressions in journal article titles 1996-2019 in 3.3 million articles from
all 27 Scopus broad fields. Expressions were identified by manually checking
all phrases with at least 5 words that occurred at least 25 times, finding 149
stock phrases, idioms, sayings, literary allusions, film names and song titles
or lyrics. The expressions found are most common in the social sciences and the
humanities. They are also relatively common in medicine, but almost absent from
engineering and the natural and formal sciences. The differences may reflect
the less hierarchical and more varied nature of the social sciences and
humanities, where interesting titles may attract an audience. In engineering,
natural science and formal science fields, authors should take extra care with
poetic expressions, in case their choice is judged inappropriate. This includes
interdisciplinary research overlapping these areas. Conversely, reviewers of
interdisciplinary research involving the social sciences should be more
tolerant of poetic license.
