The DOI matches its Crossref record; 19 of the 22 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions
Open accessAbstract
The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focused on the development of empirical approaches to studying this problem. Here, we report on the first large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, in which 169 latent print examiners each compared approximately 100 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints from a pool of 744 pairs. The fingerprints were selected to include a range of attributes and quality encountered in forensic casework, and to be comparable to searches of an automated fingerprint identification system containing more than 58 million subjects. This study evaluated examiners on key decision points in the fingerprint examination process; procedures used operationally include additional safeguards designed to minimize errors. Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%. Independent examination of the same comparisons by different participants (analogous to blind verification) was found to detect all false positive errors and the majority of false negative errors in this study. Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion.
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“For the first time in some disciplines, careful studies have attempted to estimate error rates (Ulery et al. 2011).”
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Cites
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
The forensic confirmation bias: Problems, perspectives, and proposed solutions.
Kassin, S. M., Dror, I. E., & Kukucka, J. (2013) · Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.jarmac.2013.01.001 · Cited by 634
Perceptual expertise in forensic facial image comparison
White, D., Phillips, P. J., Hahn, C. A., Hill, M., & O'Toole, A. J. (2015) · Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.1292 · Cited by 121
Repeatability and Reproducibility of Decisions by Latent Fingerprint Examiners
Ulery, B. T., Hicklin, R. A., Buscaglia, J., & Roberts, M. A. (2012) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032800 · Cited by 183
Self-citationOrientation Field Estimation for Latent Fingerprint Enhancement
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Quantifying the Weight of Evidence from a Forensic Fingerprint Comparison: A New Paradigm
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Metadata
- Authors
- Ulery, B. T., Hicklin, R. A., Buscaglia, J., & Roberts, M. A.
- Affiliations
- Noblis (US)
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (US)
- Corresponding author
- Buscaglia, JoAnn
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2011-04-25
- Volume
- 108
- Issue
- 19
- Pages
- 7733-7738
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC3093498
- OpenAlex
- W2009575609
- Cited by
- 350
- References
- 22
- Citations by year
- 2026: 24 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 29 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 31 · 2020: 40 · 2019: 21 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 17 · 2015: 23 · 2014: 21 · 2013: 20 · 2012: 10
- FWCI
- 18.13
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › Reliability and Agreement in Measurement
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Pathology and Forensic Medicine › Forensic Fingerprint Detection Methods
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Biometric Identification and Security
- Keywords
- forensic evidence reliability, false positives, false negative errors, automated fingerprint identification systems, fingerprint comparison
- MeSH terms
- Dermatoglyphics, Expert Testimony, False Negative Reactions, False Positive Reactions, Humans, Professional Competence, Software, Reproducibility of Results, Observer Variation
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