Someone pointed me to a long discussion, which he preferred not to share publicly, of his perspective on a scientific controversy in his field of research. He characterized a particular claim as “impossible to be true, i.e., false, and therefore, by definition, fiction.”
Even though this item is very short, we decided to include it in the Resource Library because we agree with the deceptively simple insight that there is value in changing our language/implicit characterisation of researchers when there is a problem with the veracity of a claim in a research output. The rationale for the change in language/thinking is very similar to the suggestion we use the term ‘illegitimate publishers’ rather than ‘predatory publishers’.
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It would be fair to characterize the typical unjustified claim in a scientific paper (pick your favorite example here) not quite as fiction (defined as “literature in the form of prose, especially short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people”), in that any evidence of such a claim is imaginary. But that doesn’t sound quite right to me. I’d characterize it more as “misleading exposition,” if such a literary classification could be said to exist.
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