Consider normalizing publication dates into a common/standard format

[bill-baumgartner]

There are different forms of publication dates reported in the Medline/Pubmed data. Many are conventional MM/DD/YYYY dates, however there are things like, "Spring 1996". This issue would involve implementing some sort of normalization function to standardize dates prior to serving them through the API.

Check with the UI team on their preference here.

[bill-baumgartner]

@Genomewide - Andy, feel free to weigh in here. It sounds like date normalization could be useful/helpful?