What are journals?
Journals are collections of scholarly articles on a particular subject, and are published regularly like magazines. As such you might also hear them referred to as periodicals or serials and they can, for example, be published weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually.
The journal title will usually give a good indication of what their focus or subject matter is, for example: Harvard Business Review or the British Journal of Nursing.
As you will note from the example above, not all journals will have the word journal in their title.
Journals are made up of volumes and issues (or parts) to identify them. Usually a volume will cover a particular year and the issue (or part) refers to a particular instalment within that volume depending on how often it is published. Sometimes the publication month or season of the journal can be used instead of an issue number and these details, together with the page number(s) are vital to finding specific articles within journals. Here is a journal article reference (in the Harvard style):
So this article by Bremmer and Zakaria was published in 2006, volume number 84 and issue (or part) number 11 and can be found on pages 22 to 25 of the Harvard Business Review.
