Paper Example. Scientific Working Group

Scientific Working Groups (SWG) involves experts of a particular scientific subject matter who cooperate and work together to help in determining best practices as well as developing a consensus on a specific topic. SWGs are grouped under NIST and involve scientists who work within a focus field. Some of the SWGs include those on analysis of seized drugs, latent fingerprints, forensic anthropology as well as facial identification working groups.

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I believe that the scientific groups were of big value because they resulted in a common direction regarding a particular issue, as well as increased efficiency. Besides, I feel that scientific working groups were of value because they helped in fostering learning and creativity, promoted a strong sense of ownership, as well as blended complementary strengths, thus leading to solutions to challenges in a specific field.

However, these scientific working groups have now been replaced with the organization for Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) at NIST. The groups only have a small difference with SWGs because they help to approve and adopt certain scientific area standards such as terminologies and definitions. However, the rest of the roles played by the groups are similar to those performed by scientific working groups.

OSAC plays an essential role by creating standards in forensic science that of high quality. OSAC has been trying to incorporate and unify the efforts of scientific working groups. Also, there is a difference in the structure of OSAC compared to those of scientific working groups. OSAC incorporates a structure with various departments such as quality infrastructure, human factors as well as legal resources committee.

References

Butler, J. M. (2014). The national commission on forensic science and the organization of scientific area committees. In Proc. 25th Int. Symp. on Human Identification. Retrieved from https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Scientific+working+groups+and+OSAC&btnG=" \l "d=gs_cit&u=%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Dinfo%3A7_IMckLjN6YJ%3Ascholar.google.com%2F%26output%3Dcite%26scirp%3D5%26hl%3Den" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Scientific+working+groups+and+OSAC&btnG=#d=gs_cit&u=%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Dinfo%3A7_IMckLjN6YJ%3Ascholar.google.com%2F%26output%3Dcite%26scirp%3D5%26hl%3Den

Stolorow, M. D. (2015, May). Looking to the future of forensic science impacted by OSAC standards activities. In National Institute of Justice Forensic Science Research and Evaluation Workshop: A Discussion on the Fundamentals of Research Design and an Evaluation of Available Literature (Held May 26-27 (pp. 100-106). Retrieved from https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Scientific+working+groups+and+OSAC&btnG=" \l "d=gs_cit&u=%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Dinfo%3AB7rAA5RJ6eQJ%3Ascholar.google.com%2F%26output%3Dcite%26scirp%3D1%26hl%3Den" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Scientific+working+groups+and+OSAC&btnG=#d=gs_cit&u=%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Dinfo%3AB7rAA5RJ6eQJ%3Ascholar.google.com%2F%26output%3Dcite%26scirp%3D1%26hl%3Den