VolumeIssue

Volume and issue are metadata used to organize scholarly journals and other periodicals. A volume typically designates all issues published within a defined period, most commonly a single calendar year. An issue (also called a number) subdivides that volume and usually corresponds to a specific release cycle, such as a month or a quarter, though some journals publish special issues with thematic content.

In citations, volume and issue help readers locate articles. A typical citation might read: Journal of Example, vol. 12, no. 3 (2020), pp. 123–130. Some journals paginate continuously across issues within a volume, while others restart page numbering with each issue. In some cases, an issue number may be omitted entirely if the journal uses continuous pagination or if the publication model uses article numbers instead of page ranges.

Variations exist across publishers and formats. Some journals do not use issues at all, issuing only volumes with a single continuous sequence. Online-only journals may present article identifiers instead of page ranges, or use an e-location ID that serves a similar purpose to an issue number. In bibliographic data, volume and number are common fields; in BibTeX, for example, volume and number correspond to the journal’s volume and issue, while some citation styles may refer to issue as the number or omit it when not applicable.

Understanding volume and issue helps readers track the publication history of a journal, locate articles efficiently, and interpret citations across print and digital formats.