Rickrolling is an Internet cultural phenomenon born in the mid 2000s. Originally confined to Internet fora, it has spread to other channels and media. In this paper, we hypothesize that rickrolling has reached the formal academic world. We design and conduct a systematic experiment to survey rickrolling in the academic literature. As of March 2022, there are 23 academic documents intentionally rickrolling the reader. Rickrolling happens in footnotes, code listings, references. We believe that rickrolling in academia proves inspiration and facetiousness, which is healthy for good science. This original research suggests areas of improvement for academic search engines and calls for more investigations about academic pranks and humor.
@article{arxiv.2204.06826,
title = {Exhaustive Survey of Rickrolling in Academic Literature},
author = {Benoit Baudry and Martin Monperrus},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.06826},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ , Proceedings of SIGBOVIK, 2022