The American Board of Forensic Anthropology Turns 40
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The professionalization of forensic anthropology in North America began with the establishment of the Physical Anthropology section (now Anthropology Section) of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) in 1972 and the development of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology (ABFA) board certification program in 1977–78. This review first outlines the history of ABFA board certification, then discusses temporal trends among ABFA diplomate recipients, ABFA leadership, and ABFA qualification requirements (i.e., examination structure and content). The data reveal that ABFA demographic and qualification developments mirror academic trends in the discipline over the past four decades. Our assessment indicates substantial growth of the ABFA from the year 2000 to present, a shorter waiting period between receipt of the PhD and board certification, and a significant shift toward a membership and leadership reflective of a younger cohort with greater representation by women. Changes in ABFA qualifications, as revealed by an exam content review over this period, reflect many of the academic trends we have seen in our discipline as a whole, including greater specialization, reliance on technological advancements, recognition of population variability, and the need to accurately measure and mitigate error and bias. With the increased availability of DNA analysis, biological profile research and expertise may be giving way to other specializations within forensic anthropology, including bone morphology, skeletal growth and development, fracture biomechanics, fracture healing, and taphonomy, including time since death estimation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.057 | 0.054 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".