A
trade magazine, also called a
trade journal or
professional magazine (and colloquially or disparagingly a
trade rag), is a
magazine whose
target audience is people who work in a particular
trade or industry. Its main goals are to keep members of the industry abreast of new developments (in which role it functions similarly to how
academic journals,
scientific journals, medical journals, and engineering journals serve their audiences) and to serve
targeted advertising to them, which earns a
profit for the publication and
sales for the advertisers while also providing
sales engineering–type advice to the readers, helping them with industrial
purchasing and
investment decisions. The collective term for this area of publishing is the
trade press (although that term sometimes
also refers to publishers of
trade paperbacks).