Forensic Science International: Synergy
Elsevier · 2019
Identifier: ISSN 2589-871X
Access and status
Cost
Free
Free to read or download at source. No account, no purchase.
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
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.
Who it is for, and when
Use it when you need a citable, genuinely free source on how forensic practice is supposed to work: accreditation, quality systems, competency, cognitive bias, evaluative reporting and the profession's response to reliability critiques. That makes it unusually useful in expert-witness disputes, where you may need to hand the court a paper it can actually open. Because everything is CC-licensed you can quote and attach it without permissions friction.
What it does not cover
It is not a digital forensics journal and rarely carries device- or artefact-level technical research; for that you need FSI: Digital Investigation. It also does not publish standards themselves, only commentary and research about them.
Go to the source
Open at sciencedirect.com (opens in a new tab)https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/forensic-science-international-synergy
Details
- Type
- Journal
- Written for
- Working examinerLawyers and courtsAdvancedWorking examiner, Lawyers and courts, Advanced
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Year
- 2019
- Identifier
- ISSN 2589-871X
- Topics
- research-publishing, open-access, validation, standards-development, error-rates
- Checked at source
Related entries
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.
DFRWS Conference Proceedings
Partly freeThe peer-reviewed paper track of the DFRWS conferences, which have run since the first workshop in 2001 and now cover three regions — DFRWS USA, DFRWS EU (rebranding as the Digital Forensics Conference Europe) and DFRWS APAC. DFRWS's own submission rules confirm accepted research papers are published as special issues of Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation.
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.
Journal of Forensic Sciences
PaywalledThe flagship journal of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, published by Wiley. AAFS runs a Digital & Multimedia Sciences section (now styled Forensic Digital & Multimedia Sciences), and this is the journal that section publishes in alongside the other forensic disciplines.
Science & Justice
PaywalledThe peer-reviewed journal of the Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences, published by Elsevier. The Society describes it as focusing on the collection and use of forensic and crime scene evidence, and it carries a long-running strand on how forensic conclusions should be expressed.