When should I use publications vs journals? They overlap a lot, and people often use them for general question on how to write a paper. Should we have a policy on when one is appropriate rather than the other? Are they mutually exclusive? Is one a subset of the other?
The current tag wiki is not really helpful here.
As Jon's answer says, the journals tag description is:
Online or printed academic periodicals in specific subjects to which the research papers in various topics are sent by the authors and are published after being reviewed and accepted by the editorial board.
This may be roughly the definition of a journal, but I think it's pretty useless. Over the past couple of years, we have been replacing these definitions with more useful guidance. So, I recommend we rewrite it along the lines of:
Questions related to journals: how to select journals, the internal workings of journals, and the role that journals play in academic publishing. Note that we do not accept questions seeking journal recommendations.
From this, it will be clearer that the journals tag is more about...well...journals, while the publications tag is more general. In particular, most questions about preparing publications, the need for publications, dealing with a lack of publications, etc., should use the latter.
journals says, with 2306 questions currently:
Online or printed academic periodicals in specific subjects to which the research papers in various topics are sent by the authors and are published after being reviewed and accepted by the editorial board.
publications says, with 7553 questions currently:
Questions related to academic publications including online and traditional journals, books, and conference proceedings.
Clearly publications is broader and more general, and likely many of the 2306 journals questions may be tagged with publications as well (somebody could run a query, I'm not an SEDE expert). But not all publications questions should be journals questions.
There are enough questions tagged with one or the other that it seems to me we should not merge into one broad publications tag if one really wants to focus on journals questions.
