Do we need the "reference request" tag?

Question

I've noticed we get a few questions with the reference-request tag.

Here are a few questions that have the tag:

• Is serotonin conclusively linked to depression?
• What is the primary mechanism behind nationalism, sports-team-ism, product-ism etc.?
• https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/4468/does-neurolinguistic-programming-really-work-specifically-why-or-why-not

From what I can see, the tag is often applied when the OP wants to make it explicit that they want an answer to provide references to the academic literature.

My sense is that the tag was originally designed for questions where the OP is trying to find a specific paper but can't remember what it was.

I think that the standard of evidence on this site is such that references are important for any good answer. This is just part of our standard of evidence. And that most questions without the reference request tag would still expect or hope to see references to the literature.

Furthermore, I can't imagine that questions that share this tag would have anything relevant in common. And for the size of the tag, only 2 people follow the tag; contrast this with something like social psychology with 11 followers.

I prefer the idea that people just indicate in the question body that they are explicitly seeking references to the scientific literature in.

Question

So, do we need the reference-request tag?

Answer 1

This isn't an answer to whether or not we want reference-request, I'll let the community decide that.

This is an answer to say, as it is now, the tag is being misused and we should remove it from questions unless they are looking for a specific article.

As an example: What is the study which shows that babies can teach young children empathy?

I was looking for the actual name of the study. I knew there was a specific reference I was looking for. That's the proper use of this tag. Just "give me some reference, any old reference" is an incorrect use for this tag.

Answer 2

Let's consider what tags are useful for:

• Tags connect experts with questions they will be able to answer.
• Tags are used in searching.
• Tags can award badges.

At this, reference-request fails drastically. The tag does not categorize a specific type of expert knowledge which people filtering for it may know by heart. Or, which people may want to represent to be an expert in.

• Tags are for sorting your question into specific, well-defined categories
• They are used for (weak) statistics.

Of course. But. it doesn't guarantee said categorization is useful/meaningful. And, this only works if the intent of the tag is clear so all questions tagged as such are actually part of that category. As Josh points out, reference-request "is being misused". If it's misused more than others (tags overall are misused quite a bit) it's not useful in this regard either.

But, I would add: tags set expectations. They add implicit context to the question on how to treat it and what type of answer to expect.

This, to me, was the main reason for the existence of this tag. An answer to a reference-request question should not be more than a reference. But, to which degree is that not already clear from the question content? Does the tag add anything implicitly which is not already explicitly stated in such questions?

Possibly, there is a group of "experts" in scouring Google Scholar, or extremely well-versed in Google-fu, which may want to pick up the challenge to search for specific papers based on limited knowledge, but, this seems fringe enough to me to not justify the tag's existence and complications with it's misuse.

I vote: abolish it.