Abstract

It is not rare to meet in scientific literature with a figure made of three circles, intersecting in such a way as to delineate all the combinations of the components that they stand for. This figure is commonly known as a ‘Venn diagram’ or ‘Venn’s three circles’. In this paper, we argue that many so-called Venn diagrams found in modern scientific literature do not truly depict intersections, and hence, are not true Venn diagrams.