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Exhaustive Survey of Rickrolling in Academic Literature

2022/04/14 by Benoit Baudry, Benoît Baudry, Martin Monperrus · 15 voices
Social Sciences · Computer Science · #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Spam and Phishing Detection #Web Data Mining and Analysis

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.06826

Abstract

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.

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