Multi-technique comparison of source and primary transfer soil samples: an experimental investigation by D Croft and...

The Croft and Pye paper has a story to tell about the differentiation capabilities of four analytical techniques. It is not however, the whole story. This may be due in part to the lack of reproducibility in the generation of results, and also in the effort to match soil samples and thus infer that the results provide stronger conclusions than is possible to make with this sort of analysis. More research must be done to establish in what instances these techniques and others provide reliable, reproducible, representative and accurate results, and in what capacity such results can be presented. As they stand, the results from this paper should be treated with great caution and not extrapolated to any other forensic case work until greater reliability of these and other techniques has been established.