A Road Map for Digital Forensic Research (DFRWS 2001 report)
Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS) · 2001
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
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.
Who it is for, and when
Read it once, early, to understand why the field's process models and terminology look the way they do — identification, preservation, collection, examination, analysis, presentation all trace back here. It is the standard citation when you need to establish that digital forensics has been treated as a scientific discipline with an explicit research agenda for twenty-five years, which is sometimes exactly the point in dispute. DFRWS hosts the full report free; its own presentation page for the report was returning a server error when this entry was checked, so the link goes to the DFRWS papers and presentations index instead.
What it does not cover
It is a 2001 agenda document: the technology discussion is obsolete, there is no method you can apply, and several of its open problems have since been solved or reframed. Do not cite it for any current technical proposition.
Go to the source
Open at dfrws.org (opens in a new tab)https://dfrws.org/papers-presentations/
Details
- Type
- Paper or report
- Written for
- Working examinerAdvancedLawyers and courtsWorking examiner, Advanced, Lawyers and courts
- Publisher
- Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS)
- Year
- 2001
- Topics
- foundations, research-publishing, standards-development, open-access
- Checked at source
Related entries
The post-conference edited volumes of the annual IFIP Working Group 11.9 International Conference on Digital Forensics, published by Springer as the numbered Advances in Digital Forensics series. Volume XX covers the twentieth conference and appeared in 2025; the working group's site lists the twenty-third conference for January 2027, so the series is live.
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.
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.
Digital Investigation
PaywalledThe predecessor title of Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation. It published from 2004 to 2019 under ISSN 1742-2876 and then the title changed; there is no new content under this name.
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.