Dropping だ in sentences

Question

I was again reading Shin Kanzen Master N1 Dokkai when I encountered a passage with a sentence which intrigued me. The second sentence read

最初と言われています。

While I do understand that dropping of だ happens in speech, especially in female speech, I was surprised when だ was dropped in the passage. How often does this happen?

Answer 1

I agree that there should be だ before と言われています. This is an example of だ抜き, and generally it should be avoided in formal texts like this. But this happens often today, and I won't call this a big mistake. Many people won't even notice this.