Preface

Analytical chemistry plays a very important role in most fields of science, industrial and environmental control, healthcare, and many other areas of academic, ecological, economic, and social values. Many innovations in analytics ultimately result in the discovery of new complex chemical compounds, clear and thorough understanding of living nature, improvement of quality and safety of goods, reduction in pollutant levels in the environment, and so on. Also, progress in analytical chemistry, as well as in any basic science, is certainly important as such. In its structure, this science is the holistic unity of qualitative and quantitative analysis, which can be considered separately in the fields of research, innovation introduction, learning the discipline in universities, training and education programmes, etc. For the last two decades, a succession of scientists specialized in general analytical methodology, chemical metrology, and analytical fields where detection and identification of chemical compounds is of particular importance, perceived and expressed an opinion that modern qualitative chemical analysis had been insufficiently described in general treatises and guidances on analytics, metrology, standardization, quality assurance, and so on. Unlike analytical techniques for qualitative and quantitative determinations, well-presented in books and reviews, theoretical principles of identification and general experimental approaches to its implementation have not received comprehensive treatment in the literature. This prevents progress in the development and consistent validation of particular qualitative procedures, quality assurance of the proper analytical data, and expressing and reporting identification errors analogously to errors/uncertainties in quantitative analysis. This book entirely devoted to chemical identification has been written especially to