Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation
Elsevier · 2020
Identifier: ISSN 2666-2817
Access and status
Cost
Partly free
Part of it is free and part is not. The entry says which part; read that before you plan around it.
Status
Current
Current as at the verification date below. Standards and tools both move — confirm at source before you rely on it.
What it is
The main peer-reviewed research journal for digital forensics. It was called Digital Investigation from 2004 through 2019 and was folded into Elsevier's Forensic Science International family in 2020, when the new title and ISSN 2666-2817 took over; the DFRWS USA, EU and APAC conferences publish their accepted research papers here as special issues.
Who it is for, and when
Read it when you need to know what the current state of the art actually is on a specific artefact, file system, app or acquisition method, and when you need something citable to support a method in a report or on the stand. It is also where the field argues about its own foundations, so opinion-evidence, error-rate and standardisation debates surface here before they reach courtrooms. If you are deciding whether a technique is generally accepted, the volume and tone of papers here is usable evidence.
What it does not cover
It is a research venue, not a how-to: there is no step-by-step tool procedure, and papers assume you already know the underlying artefacts and terminology. Access is the real limit — Elsevier gates articles behind a subscription, with single-article purchase typically around $30-40, so plan on library access or the free DFRWS copies.
Go to the source
Open at sciencedirect.com (opens in a new tab)https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/forensic-science-international-digital-investigation
Details
- Type
- Journal
- Written for
- AdvancedWorking examinerAdvanced, Working examiner
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Year
- 2020
- Identifier
- ISSN 2666-2817
- Topics
- research-publishing, validation, standards-development, peer-review
- Checked at source
Related entries
A fully open-access journal in Elsevier's Forensic Science International family, indexed in DOAJ under Creative Commons licences and funded by article processing charges rather than subscriptions. It deliberately takes the cross-cutting material — policy, quality management, education, interpretation and reporting — that the discipline-specific FSI titles do not.
The report from the first Digital Forensic Research Workshop, held in 2001, which set out a research agenda and a shared vocabulary for a field that at that point had neither. It is the document that proposed the examination process framework and the term 'digital forensic science', and it is conventionally cited as Palmer (2001); DFRWS's own page for it names no individual author.
The annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, a multidisciplinary body of over 6,500 members organised into twelve sections, one of which is Digital & Multimedia Sciences. The 79th Annual Scientific Conference is scheduled for 15-20 February 2027 at the Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel in Orlando, Florida.
The paper that introduced CASE, the Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression, an open community-developed specification language aligned with the Unified Cyber Ontology for representing and exchanging cyber-investigation information. It is co-authored by a NIST researcher and supersedes the earlier DFAX approach.
Garfinkel, Farrell, Roussev and Dinolt's DFRWS 2009 paper, published in Digital Investigation, arguing that digital forensics could not be a science without shared, redistributable test data, and introducing the corpora — including the real-data disk images and the govdocs document set — that the field went on to use.