A while ago, Michael Higdon blogged here about whether we have two many law reviews and initiated a very interesting discussion. Commenters raised questions about whether there is too much scholarship, too much bad scholarship, difficulty sifting the bad from the good etc.
One issue that came out of the discussion that might be worth fleshing out further is the question of matching scholarship to journals. A few folks suggested that maybe some of the general journals could become more 'thematic' so they could be known as THE journal for X type of article. Even if journals don't do this, many editorial boards do look for particular mixes of articles and particular topics from year to year. It struck me that maybe what would help would be a system for matching editors' preferences to articles in a particular year ie some way for the editors to signal that they are interested in a particular subject matter or range of subject matters at a particular time. While Expresso currently allows authors to indicate keywords and categories for their work, journal editors still have to sift through thousands of articles in the database, and even using the keyword search functions they probably end up with hundreds of articles many of which are only peripherally relevant to what they're looking for.
If journals had a way of signalling at particular times that they were intersted in particular topics – even with a submission cycle (eg "we have our articles on con law and tort law and now we're looking for corporate law"), would this help streamline things for authors and journals alike?
In the fiction writing area, there is a system called Duotrope which helps with this function. Magazines/publishing houses can input what they're looking for in terms of genre (which can change over time) and authors can do targeted searches to find the publishers they should submit to in terms of finding the best fit for their work. The system is not perfect, but it at least gives authors more of a chance to 'direct' their submissions rather than sending hundreds of drafts out to publishers who may not be interested in their work at any given time.
Might something like this work for law reviews?