The frequency with which profilers are called on to assist in criminal investigations has increased dramatically from year to year over the past three decades. Unfortunately, as many people have pointed out, the amount of profiling research has increased at a much slower rate over the same time period. While things seem to be gradually improving in this regard, there are still many unanswered questions about profiling that need to be answered, many of which are crucial for the field. For example, debates are ongoing about what roles profilers should play in criminal investigations, how profiles should be constructed, delivered, and evaluated, whether the contributions made by profilers are valid and, if so, how, and whether there are new, potentially more productive approaches to profiling that could improve upon or even replace the methods that are currently being used. The list of unanswered question in this field goes on and on. Clearly it is not possible in one special issue to tackle all of these questions. Instead, the goal of this issue was to bring together high quality research, conducted by a range of individuals with different backgrounds and perspectives, that tackled a variety of important issues in the profiling field. My hope is that the papers included in this special issue will help in some small way to move the profiling field forward. I feel confident that police practitioners and profilers will see value in much of what is included in this special issue. I am also certain that researchers will be inspired by this collection of papers and continue to conduct quality research on the topic of criminal profiling so that the large gap that currently exists between profiling practice and profiling research can slowly be filled. In an attempt to fill a very important gap that currently exists in the profiling field, the first article in this special issue by Melissa Martineau and Shevaun Corey examines the degree to which crime descriptions can be coded reliably using the variables included in the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS). While the relevance of this article to the field of criminal profiling may not be obvious at first glance, when one considers that ViCLAS-type data forms the basis of much profiling research the importance of this article becomes obvious. Indeed, many researchers rely on ViCLAS-type data as the basis for their studies and rarely can these researchers speak to the reliability of that data. While the results of Martineau and Corey’s study clearly cannot be generalized from ViCLAS to other databases at this time, their study is the first publication that I am aware of to directly address the issue of coding reliability within such databases. Thus, this study represents a very important contribution to the profiling field. The second article by Brandy Doan and Brent Snook uses archival police data to empirically examine one of the fundamental assumptions underlying many forms of criminal profiling – the homology assumption. This assumption states that if two offenders commit similar crimes with respect to their crime scene behaviors they should exhibit similar background characteristics. While a crucial assumption in the profiling field, few studies have actually examined whether the assumption is valid. As argued by Doan and Snook, those studies that have examined the assumption fail to find strong empirical support for it. Their test of the homology assumption, which for the first time is based on Canadian data, generally supports previous research and raises some important questions about the validity of certain profiling practices. J Police Crim Psych (2008) 23:49–50 DOI 10.1007/s11896-008-9025-8