Since the early 1990s, American and International forensic science laboratories and practitioners have collaborated in Scientific Working Groups (SWGs) to improve discipline practices and build consensus standards. As of January 2012, active SWGs include the following:
- FISWG - Facial Identification Scientific Working Group
- SWGANTH - Forensic Anthropology
- SWGCBRN - Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear
- SWGDAM - DNA Analysis
- SWGDE - Digital Evidence
- SWGDMI - Medicolegal Death Investigation
- SWGDOC - Questioned Documents
- SWGDOG - Dogs and Orthogonal Detection
- SWGDRUG - Analysis of Seized Drugs
- SWGDVI - Disaster Victim Identification
- SWGFAST - Latent Fingerprints
- SWGFEX - Fire and Explosives Scenes
- SWGGSR - Gunshot Residue
- SWGGUN - Firearms and Toolmarks
- SWGIBRA - Illicit Business Records
- SWGIT - Imaging Technologies
- SWGMAT - Materials Analysis
- SWGSTAIN - Bloodstain Pattern Analysis
- SWGTOX - Toxicology
- SWGTREAD - Footwear and Tiretracks
- SWGWILD - Wildlife Forensics
- SWGGEO
Each SWG includes scientists working within the focus field. Although a couple the above-listed SWGs have only American members, most also have international members. Federal, state or local government forensic laboratory scientists are the most common SWG members, but many SWGs also include other experts such as private laboratory scientists, academia, independent consultants, attorneys and judges.
Most SWGs have public websites with discipline-specific resources including approved and draft for comment standards, best practices guidelines and related documents.
Famous quotes containing the words scientific, working and/or group:
“To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.”
—Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)
“Every country we conquer feeds us. And these are just a few of the good things we’ll have when this war is over.... Slaves working for us everywhere while we sit back with a fork in our hands and a whip on our knees.”
—Curtis Siodmak (1902–1988)
“...Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)