Publications
The FAIMS project has published results since shortly after its inception in 2012. The selected publications list below includes government reports, peer-reviewed papers, conference presentations, and datasets written by the product team, or that name, cite, or credit Fieldmark® or its predecessor, FAIMS Mobile. Each entry reports which generation of the software it documents and whether or not the publication was peer reviewed.
Selected publications
Ballsun-Stanton B, Ross SA, Sobotkova A and Crook P 2018. FAIMS Mobile: Flexible, open-source software for field research. SoftwareX 7: 47–52. DOI 10.1016/j.softx.2017.12.006
FAIMS era · peer-reviewed
The software paper for FAIMS Mobile, and the reference most later work cites for the platform.
Sobotkova A, Ross SA, Ballsun-Stanton B, Fairbairn A, Thompson J and VanValkenburgh P 2016. Measure Twice, Cut Once: Cooperative Deployment of a Generalized, Archaeology-Specific Field Data Collection System. In Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: The Potential of Digital Archaeology, edited by Averett EW, Gordon JM and Counts DB, 337–371. Grand Forks, ND: The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. https://dc.uwm.edu/arthist_mobilizingthepast/15. Published under CC BY 4.0.
FAIMS era · peer-reviewed
Three field directors describe deploying the software on their own projects: a Neolithic tell in central Turkey, a Middle Stone Age excavation and survey in Malawi, and a late Prehispanic and early Colonial excavation in Peru. Their accounts come from post-project questionnaires and co-authorship of the paper, and their unedited correspondence with the team is published in the volume’s digital supplement.
Sobotkova A, Ross SA, Hermankova P, Lupack S, Nassif-Haynes C, Ballsun-Stanton B and Kasimi P 2021. Deploying an Offline, Multi-User, Mobile System for Digital Recording in the Perachora Peninsula, Greece. Journal of Field Archaeology 46(8): 571–594. DOI 10.1080/00934690.2021.1969837
FAIMS era · peer-reviewed
The most detailed published account of a single deployment: systematic survey and legacy feature verification in 2020, reusing and adapting two existing customisations from the FAIMS library rather than building from nothing.
Noble RRP, González-Álvarez I, Reid N, Krapf C, Cole D, Lau IC, Pinchand T, Fox D, Brant F, White A, Klump J and Petts A 2018. Regional Geochemistry of the Coompana Area. Report Book 2018/00036. Department for Energy and Mining, South Australia, Adelaide. Also published as CSIRO EP187470. DOI 10.25919/5c59cf28d6fd2
FAIMS era · government report
A 120-page government report with a section on the FAIMS Mobile application for sampling (printed pp. 19–23). Its authors are CSIRO and Geological Survey of South Australia staff, independent of the FAIMS team.
The successful trials of this application have meant that all soil/regolith, biogeochemical and hydrogeochemical sampling by CSIRO is now performed using this App.
Noble et al. 2018, p. 22
Noble R, Reid N, Klump J, Robertson J, Cole D, Fox D, Pinchand T, González-Álvarez I, Krapf C and Lau I 2020. Testing a rapid sampling and analysis workflow in the remote Nullarbor Plain, Australia. EXPLORE: Newsletter for the Association of Applied Geochemists 186 (March 2020): 1, 5–18. DOI 10.70499/NRQQ4074
FAIMS era · newsletter article
A helicopter-supported sampling campaign that paired digital field capture with a portable preparation and analysis laboratory. The article credits the FAIMS application with removing manual entry around sampling: labels carrying data-matrix barcodes were scanned rather than transcribed, tables auto-filled, and fields verified by sample type. Automated synchronisation between devices saved further hours of manual entry each day.
A wider selection
Eleven more entries, 2015 to 2026
Reid N, Klump J, Ballsun-Stanton B, White A and Sobotkova A 2015. A mobile app for geochemical field data acquisition. AGU Fall Meeting 2015, San Francisco, 14–18 December 2015. American Geophysical Union. https://hdl.handle.net/102.100.100/91153
FAIMS era · conference paper
An early published account of the geochemistry sampling application, written by CSIRO scientists with two members of the FAIMS team.
Noble R, Reid N, Klump J, White A and Cole D 2017. Coompana field sampling data. CSIRO Data Access Portal. DOI 10.4225/08/5A1E01E1796DD
FAIMS era · dataset
A published research dataset whose provenance metadata names the software (“FAIMS Android App”) and specifies the dataset’s origin (“This is a direct data export from the FAIMS server, from data collected on the FAIMS app”).
Thorne RL, Reid N, Gray DJ, Ballsun-Stanton B, Bardwell N, Klump J, Davis A, Ross S and Sobotkova A 2018. M436 Distal Footprints: UNCOVER Australia - Hydrogeochemistry of the Capricorn Orogen. CSIRO report EP182906. DOI 10.25919/5cddb339279ec
FAIMS era · report
Four pages under the heading “FAIMS Sampling Application Development”, printed pp. 33–36 and listed in the table of contents, with figures showing the application and the field server in use. Several passages complement the Coompana report’s account of the same work.
Thorne R, Reid N, Gray D, Ballsun-Stanton B, Bardwell N, Klump J, Davis A, Ross S and Sobotkova A 2018. Capricorn hydrogeochemistry data - Capricorn case study project (RP04-063-M436). CSIRO Data Access Portal. DOI 10.25919/5ef2cfdee1b41
FAIMS era · dataset
The dataset from the same project: “The field data was collected using the FAIMS android application, the elemental data was from internal and external laboratories.”
Noble R, González-Álvarez I, Reid N, Krapf C, Pinchand GT, Fox D, Ibrahimi T, Cole D and Lau I 2019. Coompana geochemistry – results from rapid surface characterisation and a deep vertical profile. MESA Journal 89 (2019, Issue 1): 4–14. https://hdl.handle.net/102.100.100/86035
FAIMS era · magazine article
The South Australian government’s geoscience magazine, which reaches the state survey and the exploration industry rather than a research audience. It credits the FAIMS application for the speed of the field collection and refers readers to the Coompana report for the details.
Ross SA, Ballsun-Stanton B, Cassidy S, Crook P, Klump J and Sobotkova A 2022. FAIRer Data through Digital Recording: The FAIMS Mobile Experience. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology 5(1): 271–285. DOI 10.5334/jcaa.96. Published under CC BY 4.0.
FAIMS era · peer-reviewed
The project team’s own account of what FAIMS Mobile was and what running it taught them, written with a CSIRO co-author.
Originally designed for archaeologists, it has now been used in disciplines including environmental geochemistry, avian ecology, linguistics, and oral history.
Ross et al. 2022, p. 272
Kidder JA, Reid N, Noble RRP, Leybourne MI, Buskard J, Bowell RJ, Stoltze A and Garrett RG 2025. A review of hydrogeochemical techniques for mineral exploration: history, present and future. Geochemistry: Exploration, Environment, Analysis 25(2): article geochem2024-065. DOI 10.1144/geochem2024-065. Open access under CC BY 4.0.
Fieldmark era · peer-reviewed
In some cases, mobile field applications have been developed to consistently collect field metadata, such as the Fieldmark app used in Australia (Crook et al. 2022).
Kidder et al. 2025
The sentence sits in the review’s guidance on field sampling practice for hydrogeochemical research. Two of the eight authors, Reid and Noble, are the CSIRO geochemists behind the Coompana and Nullarbor work above.
Devaraju A, Reid N and Pinchand T 2026. A Standard Metadata Template For Representing Water Samples. CSIRO Data Access Portal. DOI 10.25919/6wej-a875. CC BY 4.0.
Fieldmark era · dataset
An institutional CSIRO metadata standard extended with water-sample fields derived from the Fieldmark application’s field definitions.
It extends the original schema by incorporating metadata fields specific to water samples, derived from the field definitions used in the CSIRO Fieldmark application electronic field notebook system.
Devaraju et al. 2026, lineage field
Its credit field names the people behind the Fieldmark template: “Development of the Fieldmark template was contributed by Nathan Reid, Rob Thorne, Ryan Noble, and Dave Gray.”
The same record’s project description places Fieldmark’s role in a CSIRO project on end-to-end sample tracking (OD-233946), alongside the International Geo Sample Number (IGSN) and laboratory information management systems.
Devaraju A, Reid N, Pinchand T and Anand R 2026. A Standard Metadata Template For Representing Vegetation Samples. CSIRO Data Access Portal. DOI 10.25919/cnyn-tp07. CC BY 4.0.
Fieldmark era · dataset
The companion template for vegetation samples, built on CSIRO’s rock metadata template and extended from two sources, one of them Fieldmark.
It extends the original schema by incorporating metadata fields specific to vegetation samples, derived from two sources: (a) the field definitions used in the CSIRO Fieldmark electronic field notebook system, and (b) templates developed by Ravi Anand for projects undertaken through the Cooperative Research Centre for Landscape Environments and Mineral Exploration (CRC LEME).
Devaraju et al. 2026, lineage field
Its credit field carries the same Fieldmark attribution as the water template above.
Australian Research Data Commons 2022. Dirt to Desktop: Digital Tools in the Field. Case study, 15 May 2022. https://ardc.edu.au/case-study/dirt-to-desktop-digital-tools-in-the-field/
Fieldmark era · case study
FAIMS has completely changed the way Jens and his colleagues collect samples, ditching the paper for the app and providing richer data sets.
Australian Research Data Commons 2022, on the work of Dr Jens Klump, Team Leader Geoscience Analytics at CSIRO
Australian Research Data Commons. Fieldmark™ Electronic Field Notebooks. Project page. https://ardc.edu.au/project/faims-3-0/
Fieldmark era · project page
A third party’s description of the platform, from an ARDC Platforms Program project that ran from June 2020 to June 2023.
The full record
A complete (to the best of our knowledge) FAIMS and Fieldmark bibliography is available as a public Zotero library, FAIMS-publications, readable without an account. It holds 55 items in four collections: publications by the team that builds the software, and work by other researchers that cites or mentions it, in both cases divided into peer-reviewed and non-reviewed categories. Third-party citing work reaches past archaeology into mining, agriculture, development engineering, community heritage, and geospatial research.
Tell us what we have missed
Publications get missed, particularly where software is credited in a methods section, an acknowledgement, or a repository record rather than a reference list. If you have published work that used Fieldmark or FAIMS Mobile, send us the reference and we will add it. Get in touch, and see how to cite Fieldmark if you are writing something up now.