[jraph]

When I was doing research, I was bothered by the date not being anywhere in papers (PDFs).

You'd have to search the title of the paper with the names of the authors on the internet, figure out which version you are reading and find out the year of the publication using dblp [1] or finding out in which journal or conference it was published.

Yet, it's so important to actually know when something was written.

[1] https://dblp.org/

[estebarb]

I don't know of any paper template that includes the date. Usually it is only found if the preprint paper adds it (like arxiv) or in the copyright notice, that not all papers include.

With topics like ML and NLP that move fast, even the day/month becomes important, not just the year.