What's the point of the research tag? Quoting Air in chat,
research seems like a meta-tag to me.
It doesn't describe the questions; it merely gives a bit of (unnecessary) context.
Furthermore, out of the three questions that use it, two are on hold and have been downvoted, though I don't think the tag fits them. I can't see it getting much use.
Do we need the research tag?
After giving this some thought, I realized that research could describe the content of a question about, for example, aspects of conducting engineering research. That seems like an appropriate use of the tag, to me.
However, the other two questions were using the tag more to describe the aim of the question; I've removed it from both.
It's worth repeating that both of the questions I removed research from are also currently on hold. While the tag can be used appropriately, but it can also be a red flag for an unsuitable question. This site is not designed to support crowd-sourced research as such. Questions must always be reasonably scoped and answerable. Community members will perform some amount of research if warranted and are generally happy to share research they're already familiar with, but only as the means to an answer.
I can see a couple situations in which it might be useful, but I do think there's a good possibility for it to be misused, and I'm not sure the situations I'm thinking of would absolutely need a research tag.
If someone has a question about setting up an experiment, measuring some part of a system, or something else that is a part of the research, it seems to me that research would be a meta tag in that case. We don't care if it's for research or testing or anything else, we just want to know about the system itself and what you need to measure.
However, if the question is actually about research procedure on an engineering research project, I could potentially see that being in scope. Somewhere like Academia.SE would probably be well-suited to handle a research question, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they would be able to fully consider and analyze the engineering aspects of it. I don't know that the tag will be used in this manner, but I think it could.
So my feeling is that we should let the tag live, but watch its use and make sure it is used judiciously. It may turn out that the appropriate questions turn up and it becomes more meta than useful, but I don't know that that determination can be made yet.
