ArticleJournal of forensic sciences2023
Accuracy of comparison decisions by forensic firearms examiners.
Article in Journal of forensic sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 12 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Interpol review of forensic firearm examination, 2022-2025.Forensic science international. Synergy · 2026Review
- Performance criticality as a structural property of forensic expertise: Evidence from an institutional certification system.Forensic science international. Synergy · 2026Article
- Assessing the foundations of forensic identification evidence: A critical examination of proficiency test design and results.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The problem with eliminations: Why forensic comparisons need false negative rates.Forensic science international. Synergy · 2025Article
- The Hawthorne effect in studies of firearm and toolmark examiners.Journal of forensic sciences · 2025Article
- A call for open science in forensics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- An overview of log likelihood ratio cost in forensic science - Where is it used and what values can we expect?Forensic science international. Synergy · 2024Review
- The secret life of crime labs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Scientific guidelines for evaluating the validity of forensic feature-comparison methods.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Validity of forensic cartridge-case comparisons.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A method for quantifying individual decision thresholds of latent print examiners.Forensic science international. Synergy · 2023Article
- Accuracy of comparison decisions by forensic firearms examiners.Journal of forensic sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This black box study assessed the performance of forensic firearms examiners in the United States. It involved three different types of firearms and 173 volunteers who performed a total of 8640 comparisons of both bullets and cartridge cases. The overall false-positive error rate was estimated as 0.656% and 0.933% for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively, while the rate of false negatives was estimated as 2.87% and 1.87% for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively. The majority of errors were made by a limited number of examiners. Because chi-square tests of independence strongly suggest that error probabilities are not the same for each examiner, these are maximum-likelihood estimates based on the beta-binomial probability model and do not depend on an assumption of equal examiner-specific error rates. Corresponding 95% confidence intervals are (0.305%, 1.42%) and (0.548%, 1.57%) for false positives for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively, and (1.89%, 4.26%) and (1.16%, 2.99%) for false negatives for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively. The results of this study are consistent with prior studies, despite its comprehensive design and challenging specimens.
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