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Comment by DiggyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

What fields do you see this in? I read a lot of social science-y academic articles for research for a nonfiction book I’m writing, and I would be very frustrated if a date wasn’t included at the front of the article.

Though I’m not sure if I’ve been lulled into a fall sense of security by finding the date on the cover sheet of the PDF (prepended by the article’s publisher/distributer, I imagine).

In no way am I disagreeing with you, more sharing the fact that I’d be surprised and frustrated to come across this omission. Author and publishing date are arguably more important than the title, in my opinion - which now that I think about it is probably why these are the metadata we use to index citations.

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Computer Science/Math.

Here's an almost completely random example, I literally searched for "graph coloring paper" just because that was a subject I could think of top of my head, and found this as first hit: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~avrim/Papers/coloring_worstcase.pdf

Yep, no date.

In case you do not know, I find Google Scholar to be pretty useful for finding dates and other information about the paper - e.g. in this case https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=New...

I work with papers in CS/math and have been able to find dates and metadata like DOI pretty quick. There are complications when there are really multiple versions of a paper, like one in a conference that is only an extended abstract and one in a journal, but you would need to figure out which version you want to read in that situation anyway. I agree it's annoying, but coupled with reference manager software like Zotero it's hardly an issue for me.

Google Scholar is a great tool but I fear its days are numbered. It's already frustrating that they removed the feature hot linking to an article's scholar page if you enter the title in google search.

If Google Scholar is sunset that would be a great loss for the academic community. When was that feature removed? I have felt reasonably confident in Google Scholar so far because it is already 18 or so years old.

You deduce a lower bound for the date based on the years of cited publications

One wonders how the author got _those_ dates...

I mentioned that in a sibling comment. Of course, what I actually do is just a web search for the paper’s title.

That’s a preprint - check the published version https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/176584.176586 which has a date on the front page of the article.

That's a good point. Given how many apparent preprints I come across, though, I wish they'd just put a date on the front page, too.

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