The tags (publishing) and (journals) - maybe change direction or cancel the synonym

Question

At the moment there is a synonym publishing $\to$ journals. (With the tag journals as the master tag.)

I think that at least for some questions tagged journals:

• Using a tag called publishing might be more suitable.
• At least in some cases I'd guess that maybe the poster entered publishing and the system changed the tag to journals - because of the synonym.

I wonder whether it might be more reasonable to have them as two separate tags rather than a synonym.

Or if MO users want to keep questions from these topics under a single tag, maybe publishing would be more suitable as the master tag instead of journals? (If I had to choose between these two, publishing seems more general than journals.)

Questions:

1. Would it be better to cancel the synonym and have publishing and journals as two separate tags?
2. Or, if we still want a synonym, wouldn't it be better to have publishing as the master tag?

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According to the list of synonyms and this SEDE query, the synonym was suggested on 22 April 2015.and approved by a mod on 24 April 2015.

The list of synonyms shows 17 renames. This number means that in 17 cases somebody actually typed the tag publishing and the software changed it to journals. (Admittedly, it is not that much, considering that there are currently 287 question in total.)

Checking the Wayback Machine in March 2015, it seem that the tag-info for publishing was empty at the time.

The tag journals has a tag-excerpt: "Questions about mathematical publishing, including specific journals, peer review etc." And also a tag-wiki:

This tag is for questions related to publishing mathematical writings in mathematical journals, including which journal to choose for certain kinds of work, questions about peer review, preprint servers and related topics.

Both the tag-excerpt and tag-wiki were created in March 2021.)

Looking at the Wayback Machine not too long before the synonym was created, it seems that there were 3 questions tagged (publishing) and 73 questions tagged (journals) around that time.

It seems that the tags were merged by a moderator - the questions which had the tag publishing now show journals in their revision history: 181414, 73463, 176369.

Answer 1

We could also imagine create the tag journals-and-publishing (or journals-publishing) and make both journals and publishing synonyms of it. These are only 300 questions and I'm not sure two separate tags are useful.

The current tag info of journals ("Questions about mathematical publishing, including specific journals, peer review etc." ) would be suitable for such a tag.