There's a professor, Dr. Tom O'Connor at Austin Peay State University in Fort Campbell, KY who has a ton of resources on his website. http://faculty.ncwc.edu/TOCONNOR/315/315lect02.htm He gives a really nice (if lengthy) definition which I cut and pasted below. The term criminalistics (Kriminalistik) was first used by Hans Gross in 1891, but the term was mostly forgotten until the 1960s when a series of cooperative movements took place between police agencies and criminal justice or criminology departments to establish criminalistics (Univ. of California) and forensic science (Michigan State) college programs. Professors Paul Kirk in California and Ralph Turner in Michigan (among many others) were pioneers in those movements. As Osterburg and Ward (2000) imply, criminalistics programs (available at forty-one community colleges and only one four-year college) followed the police science model to record, identify, and interpret the minutia (minute details) of physical evidence, and forensic science (available at fourteen four-year colleges and nine master's degree programs) followed the medical science model to apply generally accepted principles of established disciplines (like pathology, serology, toxicology, odontology, and psychiatry) to the scientific examination of physical evidence. Forensic science is the broader term because criminalistics is a branch of forensic science. "Forensic" is simply an adjective that can be put in front of any science applied to answering legal questions.