Vibrational Spectroscopy and Chemometrics in Forensic Chemistry: Critical Review, Current Trends and Challenges

The present manuscript makes an extensive review of the scientific approaches developed in the last decade involving infrared and Raman spectroscopy combined with chemometrics for solving several issues in the investigation of the most relevant forensic traces, such as questioned documents and currency, explosives, gunshot residues, illicit drugs and body fluids. In addition, current trends, main challenges and the adequate use of several chemometric techniques are discussed. Principal component analysis (PCA) was found to be the most used technique. This unsupervised approach, however, has so...