Acronyms are commonly used in scientific papers to conserve space and prevent authors from having to restate a long phrases. An expert may see certain abbreviations as common; however, a general audience may not.
Is it really appropriate to use acronyms as tags, or should acronyms be avoided?
Acronym tag examples - dft, td-dft, iupac, epr, qtaim, inn, ft-ir, hsab, dna-rna, nmr
My answer to this question is a definite it depends.
One major thing about tags is that they must be shorter than 25 characters. So international-union-of-pure-and-applied-chemistry can’t be a tag (49 characters), hence iupac. That can probably be applied to most tags on the list if they are organisations. infrared-spectroscopy would, for example, be a possible tag rather than ft-ir.
A second question is whether an abbreviation is necessary at all. In my opinion, it is not for nucleic-acids, which should imho be preferred over dna-rna. But that is because DNA and RNA seems more restrictive than nucleic acids to me.
Of course there are acronyms (although they do not have tags afaik) that are more of a backronym if you’re honest: Take for example INADEQUATE. Even if that would fit, absolutely nobody knows the full name unless they just looked it up because they are TA for the NMR course. The same basically applies to all NMR abbreviations, which should definitely be used: cosy, not correlation-spectroscopy (But note the caveat that these are not good tags).
But the most important point of this answer is yet to come:
In each and every case where a tag is an abbreviation, the full name must be stated in the tag wiki excerpt so you can find out what it is if you hover over the tag.
