Spurred on by an aside that spatialed made in some discussion post awhile back (I can't locate the post), I'm considering revising the way that we model journal issues.  Currently, each issue has its own topic, which links to both the journal and the articles contained in that issue. (See
http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/book/journal_issue)  The main problems with this format are that it is cumbersome to enter data, and also that most bibliographic sources are concerned primarily with the article and the journal, relegating the issue to a series of strings (volume, issue, date). This latter issue might make integration with standard bibliographic schemas a bit cumbersome, although it wouldn't be insurmountable.

As an experiment, though, I thought I'd try to see what a model that eliminated the issue type entirely looked like.  Here are the results:
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008cd1edd.

I've replaced the issue type with a CVT that connects the article and the journal, and includes the standard bibliographic data of Volume, issue, date, issue date extra, and pages ("issue date extra" is something I had to make up for journals that aren't published on a schedule that translates into mm/dd/yyyy).  Journal articles have both Scholarly Work and Written Work as included types, although a journal article can also be a review, editorial, letter or other type of writing.

The only real disadvantage that I see to this is that constructing the contents of a given issue will be harder -- users will have to query on a combination of several fields (volume, issue, etc.) to find what they're looking for.

I'd love to hear what people think about this. If it seems to work, I might do the same thing for newspaper issues.

This is also being discussed on the data-modelers mailing list: http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/data-modeling/2008-July/000989.html