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To address persisting problems with this community, a long time ago we initiated a 'reboot' of the site as part of which we decided on a more professional target audience. To this end, we introduced a new close vote reason. This has made it much easier to deal with bad questions and encourage the types of questions we do want! However, we still want more good questions being asked per day, which requires us to attract more professionals.

To this end, we have determined the site name should change! As highlighted in our community review, the site name can lead to confusion and scares off potential expert users:

The current consensus is to try get "Psychology and Neuroscience" approved. However, if the concatenated name is not allowed (despite a lot of historical support), we are okay with settling with just "Psychology" (this also got some traction more recently). Although opinions vary on this, we do want to emphasize that the reason the inclusion of 'neuroscience' has received a lot of support historically is because (1) some do not associate neuroscience directly to psychology, in fact they show up as separate clusters of research, (2) we explicitly want to reach out to neuroscience as many experts currently do not feel at home here.

This question is primarily a representation of the current consensus for the benevolent StackExchange folks so that they hopefully can take action. However, feel free to post objections as answers. If they receive a lot of up votes than we can take that as an indication that this discussion should be re-opened.

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    FYI: Community team has been notified.
    – Steven Jeuris Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 8:22
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    In the past, I've expressed support for "Mind and Brain" (or some variant like "Mind and Brain Research") as a title, since it intersects both the reductive focuses of neuro (in brain) and the more holistic view of psych (in mind). It also matches a wikipedia top-level portal. Since it is hard to use that in a url, we could use psychology.SE or mind.SE or brain.SE as the url (or even the current cogsci.SE, although that is less desirable). This is done by other sites like stats.SE for Cross Validated.
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 8:46
  • @StevenJeuris - apologies for the delay. It's kind of hectic here. Thanks for your efforts. However, would it be wise to send another email explicitly stating our two choices? It's not all too clear what our list of options is. Would it be best to delete my answer below?
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 9:17
  • @AliceD I believe it is fine as is, as it simply refers to this post which was intentional. There is more to the discussion than two simple choices which are presented. The alternative would have been including this entire post and taking the discussion off meta. I'm certain the community team will read through these posts with due diligence allowing them to understand the two options.
    – Steven Jeuris Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 11:06
  • @StevenJeuris - I am sending a proposed email shortly via email for you guys to check. I think we should be very explicit to the SE team. I think they get a lot of emails, requests, tips, issues, complaints and what not. Don't you think? Personally, as a busy SE employee I would not know where to start. We should tell them what to do, not ask them what we should do.
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 11:09
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    @Artem this suggestion (of which I was also originally a big proponent) and subsequent (negative) vote is listed in the review above. The majority has since settled on the name(s) brought forward in this post.
    – Steven Jeuris Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 11:13
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    @Steven thanks for the update. I am happy to support whatever name the community thinks is best.
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 12:24

3 Answers 3

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On November 22, 2017 we submitted the proposal to the SE community mod team for this site to be renamed from Cognitive Sciences into:

  • Psychology & Neuroscience (preferred option), or
  • Psychology (in case single-word site names are enforced).

With that, we proposed our domain to be changed from cogsci.stackexchange.com into:

  • psychology.stackexchange.com, or
  • psych.stackexchange.com

This proposal was based on the following posts, among others:
- https://cogsci.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2294/cognitive-science-reboot-2017-changing-the-name
- https://cogsci.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/537/what-should-we-change-the-name-of-our-site-to-if-anything

Update December 13, 2017
I received an email from the SE team and an excerpt is posted below. It's all good news imo:

Thank you very much for reaching out about this, and for all the thoughtful work the community has done to arrive at this request. I apologize you've been waiting quite so long, but I wanted you to know I'm currently reaching out to the dev team with the intent of making the following changes:

New name: Psychology & Neuroscience
New site URL: psychology.stackexchange.com

[H]opefully this change can now get sorted for you rather quickly. Stay tuned!

Update December 18, 2017

Look at the comment from Ana!!! ...Jaws theme playing...

Update2 December 18, 2017
And.... We are online!!!

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  • Any update on this?
    – Seanny123
    Commented Dec 6, 2017 at 16:57
  • @Seanny123 - yes - see above update
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 8:45
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    OMG. I am literally unable to contain my excitement in regards to this news. I am dancing in my computer chair.
    – Seanny123
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 18:35
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    Hey folks! The change should be going through today. Hold onto your hats. :)
    – Ana StaffMod
    Commented Dec 18, 2017 at 17:14
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    @Ana whoohooottttttttt !!!! Do we all get a secret hat now? ;-)
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Dec 18, 2017 at 19:40
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    Should be all set - the main thing missing right now is updates to the Twitter account (coming soon, I gotta work access out with IT first) and stackexchange.com may lag behind as well. Outside of those two things, give me a shout if anything looks out of place or broken.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Dec 18, 2017 at 22:08
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    @AdamLear thanks for all this. At this point I haven't spotted anything out of the ordinary.
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Dec 18, 2017 at 23:18
  • @AdamLear - apparently the name is not displayed correctly on the android app - see this recent meta post
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Dec 20, 2017 at 9:17
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    I just saw the name change. Congratulations <strike>cogsci</strike> psychology community! This decision was literally years in the making, I hope this helps our community
    – Josh
    Commented Dec 22, 2017 at 4:38
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Thanks for this.

My thoughts -

  • Psychology: My personal preference, as pointed out elsewhere. Good to draw attention from new users (as you indicate is quite essential at this stage), reflects our present scope, it's catchy and probably much easier to find on the SE network than Cognitive Sciences.
  • CogSci (i.e. leave as is): probably good to repel self-helps, although the number of self-help questions is already pretty high as it is. In other words, keeping the name for the sakes of scope focus may not be useful anyway. It would be nice to see some stats on the #posts closed based on self-help when Psychology/Psychiatry were still up :) My fear is a little bit that changing our name [back] to Psychology will be drawing in more self-helps.
  • Psych&Neurosci; I am not too happy with this; as pointed out elsewhere. In a nutshell - Neurosci overlaps with Psych and Bio and I consider it to be one of the subdisciplines of Psychology/CogSci and Bio. I think Neurosci should be included in the scope descriptives, but not in the site's name proper. FWIW, At Bio we receive quite a lot of Neurosci questions regardless of the site's name [in fact more than here]. I think we shouldn't be adding sub-disciplines in our site's name to try to lure in more people.

In conclusion: at this stage I would vote to change the site's name to Psychology to increase the audience, or as an alternative to keep the site's name as is (Cognitive Sciences) to repel oftopic posts. I vow against Psych&Neurosci.

Note
I am the newest mod around and I will support Steven, Jeromy & Artem on their views and decisions, as well as other hi-rep users around. I'm just giving my 2-cents

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    Just for the record, my vote would be for: "Psychology Stack Exchange".
    – Jeromy Anglim Mod
    Commented Sep 28, 2017 at 6:57
  • @JeromyAnglim, thanks for that. Same here.
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Sep 28, 2017 at 7:01
  • I do not recall us ever doing a "Psychology" vs. "Psychology and Neuroscience" vote, but my recollection (which obviously can be flawed) is definitely that out of the many times this was discussed, the concatenated form was preferred by most (at least historically).
    – Steven Jeuris Mod
    Commented Oct 6, 2017 at 8:34
  • @StevenJeuris Whatever milks your Jersey! I didn't join in the discussion telco so feel free to propose the Psych&Neurosci option. It would get my last vote with Psychology having my preference. Just my 2 cents (and Jeromy's fwiw). Could you put me in the loop when you contact SE?
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Oct 6, 2017 at 8:42
  • Just thinking out loud: given our close ties to biology, I wonder if it is worthwhile considering approaching them to be absorbed. It would require a slight scope widening by them and the name would still be a poor fit, but maybe the community would benefit? Or do you think that would that just be a deathblow to the CogSci community on SE?
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 10:14
  • @ArtemKaznatcheev - wow that's something.... My intuitive response would be no way, but I'll let it sink in a bit. I could always put a post on meta to probe the community there, and approach the other two mods over at Bio. But I think it would definitely be a deathblow. I think that, as a wild guess, Bio is about 50% molecular Bio (DNA/proteins) and 30% evolution, perhaps 5% is NeuroSci. Bio has been growing rapidly the last few months, so in all, CogSci will literally be absorbed in a comparatively huge site and subsequently desintegrated in a bed of DNA and protein questions I'm afraid.
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 10:24
  • Okay, sounds like I suggested a bad idea then. It would certainly be bad to get lost in a bunch of DNA.
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 10:29
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    @ArtemKaznatcheev - I think so too. I quite like Bio.SE, but it is vastly different than CogSci
    – AliceD Mod
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 10:35
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How about Mind Sciences?

"Brain and Mind Sciences" would sound better though.

Examples of usage:

https://sydney.edu.au/brain-mind/

http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/

http://web.unitn.it/en/drcimec/10176/cimec-center-mindbrain-sciences

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ion/education/courses/brainandmindsciences

http://portal.idc.ac.il/en/main/research/pages/sagol-center.aspx

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