The proliferation of meta-research tags

Question

I have looked through our tags, and have found the following list of tags that seem to be (at least in part) about doing research in cogsci:

• experiments - 5 questions

• reproducible-research - 4 questions (I don't understand what this tag is about, can someone clarify in comments or an answer?)

• reference-request - 4 questions

• apparatus - 1 question

• tools - 1 question

• experimental-design - 1 question

publication - 1 question

resources - 1 question

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Do we really need that many tags? Can we merge some of them in a smart way?

It seems obvious that tools, resources, and apparatus should all be merged together. I would also suggest that they be merged into some sort of bigger tag that covers experimental-design and some of the questions tagged experiments. I would propose we name such an overall tag as methodology or research-methodology. I think the first is a better name, but the second would be easier for new users typing in the tag-box to find.

The tag experiments seems to be a particular sore point. One question is about running experiments, and thus would fall under a broad methodology tag. The rest of the questions just seem to be stressing that they want references to experiments, or just references... in this case I think those 4 questions can either have the tag removed (since we should be pointing out experiments anyways in our answers) or atleast changed to reference-request if it is obvious that they want reference to specific studies (as is here and here).

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I wanted to run this observation past the community before making any changes. Do my suggestions seem reasonable? Also, what is a better name methodology or research-methodology?

Answer 1

I have done the re-tagging, most things have now been merged into methodology and reference-request. I did not touch the tags reproducible-research or publications since I did not get any clear feedback on them.

Answer 2

I think many of your suggestions are sound. For example, I don't think we have any need to an experiments tag. I also think that you're correct in your assertion that tools, resources, and apparatus can all fit under one tag.

I do think that reference-request has a purpose. It's for people looking for a given paper/study/reference which they know exists but forgot the name/author of. Similar to the "what's that game?" questions on Gaming.SE.

Answer 3

Thanks Artem for getting this discussion started.

• I like the tags experimental-design and research-methodology.
• I created reproducible-research to refer to questions about reproducible research, i.e., strategies for making statistical analyses and data reproducible. That said, others have then used the tag to flag other uses, such as a request for research of any kind.
• We can also at some point create tag synonyms, although they seem to take a bit of work in terms of having sufficient rep in both tags to create them and then getting sufficient votes to approve them. But then again, maybe I'm just not that familiar with them.
• I think reference-request has been used both to request a specific known paper, and to note that the question specifically seeks references. I'm not sure whether this is a problem or not.
• I changed my apa question from publication to publication-process. Hopefully that makes the tag less ambiguous.
• I'm not sure about methodology versus research-methodology. Both look fine to me.

More broadly, I guess there is an issue of how prescriptive we should be with tags, or whether we should let them grow more organically. But I guess that's a separate discussion.