History

The first edition of the Compendium on Analytical Nomenclature was published in 1977, as a result of the pioneering work of the editors, H.M.N.H. Irving, H. Freiser and T.S. West. It was a collection of all those reports on analytical nomenclature which had been accepted by the competent IUPAC bodies and publsihed in Pure and Applied Chemistry between 1960 and 1976 (one in 1978), a total of 23 reports.

In the Preamble to the first edition the editors devoted a whole section to ideas and recommendations concerning the standardization of nomenclature. The contents of this section are still useful for all those who are committed to the standardization of symbols and terms to be used in analytical chemistry.

The second edition of the Compendium was published in 1987, in which the chapters were revised, supplemented or replaced by the reports on nomenclature (11) which had appeared between 1976 and 1984.

The manuscript was prepared by H. Freiser and G.H. Nancollas. The original format and structure of the first edition was kept, including the useful alphabetical index of terms.

In 1992, A. Hulanicki, President of the Division of Analytical Chemistry of IUPAC initiated a comprehensive revision of the Compendium, because of the great number of reports on nomenclature that appeared in the early 90s, due to the acceleration of the work within tlle commissions.

In the last decade the demand for new analytical procedures has increased steadily and at the same time the diversity of the techniques has expanded and the quality and performance characteristics of the procedures have come to be a focus of interest. New types of instrumental and automatic techniques have emerged and computerization has taken over. The scope of analytical chemistry has been widened as the question to be answered was not only the chemical composition of the sample, but also the structure of substances, and changes in composition and structure in space and time.

In step with the revolutionary development of analytical chemistry the use of these analytical procedures - as tools yielding chemical information on material - has become indispensable in nearly all fields of human activities, including research, development, production and service.

The widespread application of analytical methods has called for scientific and universal regulation of the terms used, for the sake of uniformity, for understandability and for straightforward communication between experts in the most diverse fields.

tor the above reasons the Analytical Division Committee of IUPAC has instituted and supported this revision of the Compendium. A Working Party for the revision was established from those who had the responsibility of preparing the drafts and the final text for publication. In addition, each Commission delegated a "coordinator" whose responsibility was to mediate between the Working party and their Commission.
 

Format and Structure of the Compendium

Atter a discussion during the meeting of Commission V. 1 in Enschede (The Netherlands) in 1992, in the presence of the Division President, it was decided not to change the structure of the Compendium for practical reasons and to continue to use the former structure with minor modifications. The following new chapters were proposed:

1. Selected physico-chemical terms and quantities used in analytical chemistry;

18. Quality assurance in analytical chemistry and

19. Applications.

In addition, considerable revision of existing chapters was to be undertaken.
 

Preparation of the text for publication

In the preparation of Chapter 1 the IUPAC book "Quantities, Units and Symbols in Physical Chemistry", Blackwell, Oxford 1992, (the "Green Book") served as the fundamental source. The first drafts of all other chapters were prepared by revising and completing the text of the second edition on the basis of the relevant papers published in Pure and Applied Chemistry (abbreviated as PAC in references throughout the volume) since 1987. As for the preparation of the new chapters 18 and 19, the relevant papers on quality assurance and application fields (biology, biochemistry, environment) were compiled into a structure similar to that of the existing chapters.

Each chapter now starts with an introduction in which the scope of and rationale behind the structure is summarised. In spite of our effort to give a uniform structure to all the chapters, we were not entirely successful because of the diversity of the fields and limited time and capacity. In the Preamble to the first edition of the Compendium the editors complained of the inhomogeneity in style and approach as well as the overlaps and contradictions of the papers serving as source documents in the preparation of the chapters. (An analytical chemist may be envious seeing the uniformity of physico-chemical terms in the Green Book.)

The numbering of subsections of the chapters is limited to four (seldom five) decimals. It is expected that the terms will be found easily within the subsections as they are in alphabetical or logical order.

At the end of the individual chapters the references are given listing all PAC publications under the heading relevant papers which were used as source documents in the preparation of the chapters. Care was taken not to modify the sentences of the original publications.

Following the relevant (source) papers a few related papers are listed which may be consulted by those interested.

As a general rule no other paper published elsewhere and cited in the original reports is referenced. The reader is expected to consult the original reports for a full bibliographic list. The drafts of all chapters were reviewed and commented on by the appropriate Commissions or their experts with the assistance of the coordinators.

In the process of finalization the suggestions and comments were incorporated into the text by the editors. All the texts not taken from the source documents (introductions, comments preamble etc.) were linguistically reviewed.

The number of relevant papers incorporated into the present edition is 85.

The index of this edition contains ca 6,000 entries. The cross-references may help the readers to find the correct terms which they are looking for.
 

Aspects of the third edition

The outcome of the work done by the Working Party is this published volume. It is expected that the readers who are interested in IUPAC recommendations concerning analytical terms and definitions will be able to find them quickly and easily in the Compendium. In the text of the Compendium there are, occasionally, contradicting definitions which result from the fact that the experts of different fields - while trying to do their best-hold different views on certain key issues. One of the missions of this Compendium may be to stimulate a higher level of conformity and communication between the experts in rapidly developing areas of science.
 

Acknowledgements

The chairman of the Working Party wish to express his gratitude to A. Hulanicki (Poland), former Division President, for his committment and active help in the first stage of the work. He also thanks M. Grasserbauer (Austria), succeeding Division President, for responding and helping promptly in many cases.

Thanks go also to I.M. Mills (UK) for being so kind as to give his consent to use texts and tables from the Green Book for the preparation of Chapter 1.

Thanks are given to T. Lengyel (Hungary) who we regret to report died after a severe illness in 1995. Until his very last days he was busy with the work. Similarly, thanks are expressed to J.B. Jensen (Denmark) who also died in 1995.

The chairman thanks A.M. Ure (UK) who did excellent work in preparing the drafts of Chapters 10, 11 and 12. The valuable help of all members of the Working Party in the coordinating work is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks also to L.A. Currie (USA) for his contributions to Chapter 18 and to A. Townshend and D.T. Burns (UK) for their linguistic revisions. The comments of G. Friedbacher (Austria) and M. W. Linscheid (Germany) for Chapters 17 and 12, respectively, are gratefully acknowledged.

Thanks are also given to A. Gelencser (Hungary) for his work during the years 1993-1997 (as secretary since 1995) and for the preparation of the index; to P. Karpati (Hungary) for the immense work of final editing and insertion of the figures; to M. Williams and to Ms. E. Sheppard, Mrs. U. Inglis (UK) for their kind assistance in Oxford; to S. Rallison for his help in publishing this Compendium.

The chairman thanks Mrs. I.Jano (Hungary) for her help in administration, typing and correspondence.

This Compendium would never have been published without the scientific effort of all the members of the Commissions in preparing the recommendations published in PAC.

Veszprem, February 1997
Janos Inczedy