The independent-researcher tag has the following tag wiki excerpt:
An independent researcher is not affiliated with any university or academic institution, and does not receive grants from any such institutions.
Many of the questions in the tag are consistent with this meaning. For example,
- What to put in “affiliation” field when submitting paper without affiliation?
- Applying for research funding as an independent researcher?
- Independent Research and institutional review boards?
- How to get a .edu email address as an independent mathematician?
However, other relate to the different meaning of "developing academic independence (from one's supervisor) as a research student or postdoc." For example:
- To what extent should a professor give students freedom to do independent research?
- Can a 3 years PhD make an independent researcher ? Or how many post-docs after PhD to be an independent researcher?
- How important is advisor's supervision for a Ph.D. student to be an independent researcher?
and several others.
This is a bad ambiguity, since people looking for questions about "unaffiliated researchers" are not the same people who are looking for questions about "research independence".
I therefore propose to:
- Rename independent-researcher to unaffiliated-researcher (using the magic mod tool, so it won't bump any questions)
- Create a tag research-independence with the wiki excerpt
On developing academic independence (e.g., from one's supervisor) as a research student or postdoc.
- Re-tag the mistagged questions in independent-researcher that are really about research-independence
One thing I am not sure about is what to do with independent-researcher. I feel like it should be made a synonym of something, since people are likely to try and create it otherwise; but I'm not sure which it should be made a synonym of.
