Which articles and which topics in the forensic sciences are most highly cited?

Forensic science is a multidisciplinary field, which covers many branches of the pure, the applied and the biomedical sciences. Writing-up and publishing research findings helps to enhance the reputation of the investigators and the laboratories where the work was done. The number of times an article is cited in the reference lists of other articles is generally accepted as a mark of distinction. Indeed, citation analysis has become widely used in research assessment of individual scientists, university departments and entire nations. This article concerns the most highly cited papers published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences (JFS) between 1956 and 2005. These were identified with the help of Web-of-Science, which is the on-line version of Science Citation Index, produced by Thomson Institute for Scientific Information (Thomson ISI) with head offices in Philadelphia, USA. This database tracks, among other things, the annual citation records of articles published in several thousand scientific journals worldwide. Those JFS articles accumulating 50 or more citations were identified and rank-ordered according to the total number of citations. These articles were also evaluated according to the name of first author, the subject category of the article, the country of origin and the pattern of co-authorship. This search strategy located 46 articles cited between 50 and 292 times since they first appeared in print. The most highly cited paper by far was by Kasai, Nakamura and White (USA and Japan) concerning DNA profiling and the application of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in forensic science. Some forensic scientists appeared as first author on two to three highly cited articles, namely Wetli (USA), Budowle (USA) and Comey (USA). When the highly cited articles were sub-divided into subject category, 15 were identified as coming from toxicology, closely followed by criminalistics (14 articles), pathology (nine articles), physical anthropology (five articles), forensic psychiatry (two articles) and one from odontology. The number of co-authors on these highly cited articles ranged from one to nine and the names of some investigators appeared on as many as four highly cited papers. The vast majority of papers originated from US laboratories although five came from Japan, two each from Sweden and Canada and there was also a joint USA-Swiss collaboration. The Thompson ISI citation databases provide unique tools for tracking citations to individual articles and impact and citation records of scholarly journals.     

The use of multiple informants to assess children's maltreatment experiences

Most researchers rely exclusively on the reports of protective service workers to determine children's abuse history. In this report, information about children's maltreatment experiences is obtained from protective service workers and three supplementary sources of data: parents, medical records, and clinical observations. Fifty-six children from 34 families receiving protective services for verified reports of physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and/or emotional maltreatment participated in the study, with most children known to have experienced more than one type of abuse. The supplementary data provided important information about the range and severity of children's maltreatment experiences. Review of the parent and medical record data led to identification of 28 children who had additional types of maltreatment experiences that were not reported by their protective services workers—nine cases of physical abuse, two cases of neglect, five cases of sexual abuse, and 12 cases of emotional maltreatment. Supplementary data also revealed information about incidents of specific types of abuse that were more severe than those reported by the children's protective service workers in an additional 24 cases. A method was devised to synthesize information provided from the different sources of data examined in this report to derive 0–4 point ratings of four categories of maltreatment experiences: (1) physical abuse, (3) neglect, (3) sexual abuse, and (4) emotional maltreatment. The Kappa reliability coefficients for each of these scales were .88, .73, .83, and .90, respectively. Data demonstrating the relationship between these maltreatment ratings and various indices of the children's socioemotional and cognitive functioning were also presented to provide preliminary support for the validity of these scales. The findings from this study suggest that multiple sources of data should be examined in order to obtain accurate assessments of children's maltreatment experiences, and that independent raters can synthesize discrepant data to obtain reliable and valid estimates of children's abuse history. Clinical and methodological issues relevant to the improved assessment of children's maltreatment experiences are also discussed.