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Currently, the tag wiki excerpt for read:

Queries and Discussion related to either qualitative or quantitative productivity of a scientist/scholar.

The full tag wiki then goes on to say:

The term scientific productivity often refers to attempts on quantifying to scientific impact of an individual’s research publications. There are a number of indices to quantify impact of a scientist in their respective fields, by means of number of papers produced, etc.; like h-index, g-index etc.

So OK, it's about measuring the impact of a scientist/scholar. Indeed, some of the questions in this tag are consistent with this meaning - notably, those that are also tagged with .

However, more of the questions with this tag are about productivity in the sense of "tips for being more efficient as a scientist." For example,

Finally, some are about neither of these things, like

It's not clear to me whether there is another meaning of that I'm not getting, that applies to these and similar questions, or whether they are just tagged incorrectly.

I am concerned about this ambiguity, because it does not seem like people searching for questions about "measuring the impact of a scientist/scholar" are also looking for questions on "becoming more efficient".

What should be done about the tag?

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I say burninate. I agree that seems to cover the intended use.

I'm also not really happy about its name. "Scientific" leaves out vast swaths of the academic community, which tend to be under-represented here to start with. We don't need to further alienate our colleagues in the arts, humanities, and other fields.

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  • Do you think we need a tag for the unintended use, "tips for being more efficient as a scholar"? Or do you think an existing tag already covers these?
    – ff524
    Commented Sep 18, 2014 at 3:29
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    Maybe simply productivity? Or is that too vague? A couple of them may be covered by work-life-balance.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Commented Sep 18, 2014 at 3:33
  • burninate would remove the tag entirely from every question it's on. If we should have a "productivity" tag, then the course of action would be not to burninate, but to rename "scientific-productivity" to "productivity" (and then retag the questions where it isn't appropriate). I'm not sure which approach you're advocating, can you edit your answer to clarify?
    – ff524
    Commented Sep 18, 2014 at 3:36
  • @ff254: Well, to put it this way, I don't think a tag named scientific-productivity with a purpose as currently described in the wiki needs to exist. Perhaps a tag called productivity should exist and be applied to some questions that are currently mistagged scientific-productivity but I am not sure about that. If it is more convenient to rename rather than burninating and letting the potential productivity be gradually added to those questions that need it, that is fine too.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Commented Sep 18, 2014 at 3:43
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    Rename (aka "merge") would instantly and silently change every existing instance of scientific-productivity to productivity. This is very different from just removing the tag altogether, because it preserves the information that somebody thought these questions are somehow related to "scientific-productivity"
    – ff524
    Commented Sep 18, 2014 at 3:45
  • I would have to become Trogdor to burninate.
    – StrongBad
    Commented Sep 18, 2014 at 16:42

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