Abstract: The present invention provides a method and system of assigning a publication date for at least one electronic document, where the publication date includes the year that the document was published, the month that the document was published, and the day that the document was published. In an exemplary embodiment, the method and system include (1) recognizing the publication date in the document by regular expression pattern matching, (2) if the publication date is ambiguous, resolving the ambiguous publication date, and (3) validating the publication date. In an exemplary embodiment, the recognizing includes determining at least one candidate publication date from the document identifier of the document. In an exemplary embodiment, the recognizing includes determining the publication date from the textual content of the document. In an exemplary embodiment, the recognizing includes determining the publication date from the metadata of the document.