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The title says it all, really - should we have a tag for physical organic chemistry?

I think there is absolutely no doubt that it satisfies the usual metrics in terms of scope, etc. and currently there is a risk of some questions simply not fitting in too well with other tags (see How are $\sigma$ and $\sigma^\pm$ determined in Hammett plots? for one example).

My main concern is that it could potentially be misused, since it contains three(!) broad keywords.

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    $\begingroup$ Hmm, this whole tagging system seems kinda lame to me :D More precisely, it's vastly inferior to categories on Wikipedia. $\endgroup$
    – Mithoron
    Dec 10, 2017 at 21:52
  • $\begingroup$ @Mithoron link plz $\endgroup$
    – orthocresol
    Dec 10, 2017 at 22:47
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    $\begingroup$ What link; sth like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category ? I thought mostly about lack of limits on number and length, so maybe simplified, not necessarily inferior. $\endgroup$
    – Mithoron
    Dec 11, 2017 at 0:46
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    $\begingroup$ @Mithoron Oh, I see, you were referring to the tagging system in general. My bad, I thought you were talking about our actual categories on chem.se. $\endgroup$
    – orthocresol
    Dec 11, 2017 at 1:09

2 Answers 2

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I don't see much harm in creating it.

There is a multitude of questions coming in (everyday) that are mistagged; often just using . Almost every question will be edited at one point or another, most of them are edited even more often, especially those of new users. I don't think we need to concern ourselves with the possibility of initial misuse at that stage anymore.
The only question I think is important now, is whether its scope is well-defined and whether it can stand on its own. I think both of these can safely be answered with yes.

Additionally, any tag that draws from the "big three" can in the long term only have a net positive effect.
I personally do not pay much attention to these tags anymore. Most of them already umbrella such a wide scope that they are hardly useful as a sorting tool (organic [22%], inorganic [10%], physical [9% of non-deleted questions]).

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  • $\begingroup$ Okie dokie, I’ll try and create it tonight or something. $\endgroup$
    – orthocresol
    Dec 11, 2017 at 10:26
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I don't understand why not to just use both and in these cases? I haven't seen many questions where the 5-tag limit can or should be exceeded, if that was also a concern.

I thought the beauty of a flat tag system is that combination of multiple tags allows for precisely defined intersections. I'm afraid that creating such a tag might result in an avalanche of the similar tags, such as physical-inorganic-chemistry; computational-organic-chemistry, analytical-chemistry-in-fiction and so on, which will only over-complicate navigation.

Still, I'm relatively new to this site and probably I'm missing something. The thoughts above reflect solely my opinion formed by user experience with other web-services offering clouds of tags, and some tag-oriented software like TagSpaces and Zotero.

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    $\begingroup$ hmm... that is a possibility too. My main objection is that I don't like using the broad tags [phys-chem], [org-chem], etc. and intuitively if I wanted to search for physorgchem questions, I wouldn't think of searching for both tags together. That aside, I don't know exactly why, but I considered physorgchem sufficiently distinct to warrant a tag of its own. The tag limit is probably not the main problem here - my intent is to have a tag for a field of chemistry which will allow for better categorisation and hence connect askers and answerers better. $\endgroup$
    – orthocresol
    Dec 12, 2017 at 20:07

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