| Summary: | This Update is part of a series of annual reviews which cover various aspects of analytical atomic spectrometry. This year’s review follows the same format as last year’s.1 Although an attempt is made to consider all relevant refereed papers, conference abstracts, reports, book chapters and patents for inclusion, the content of the review is highly selective. The selection of papers is based on criteria applied to focus sharply on the most significant developments in instrumentation and methodology or improved understanding of the fundamental phenomena involved in the MS process. The increasing importance of speciation and the blurring of boundaries between atomic and molecular MS require a high degree of judgement to be made in considering papers for inclusion. The main ruling criterion for all speciation papers is that the work should involve or be intended for the study of natural systems. For example, the study of synthetic metal clusters is generally not included, whereas the determination of organometallic compounds in environmental samples is. Applications of atomic MS are not covered in this Update and readers are referred to the Updates on Industrial Analysis: Metals, Chemicals and Advanced Materials,2 Environmental Analysis3 and Clinical and Biological Materials, Food and Beverages.4 Other fundamental reviews appear on X-ray fluorescence spectrometry5 and atomic emission, absorption and fluorescence spectrometries.6Throughout this review, the term molecular ion will be restricted to denote only the positive or negative radical ion formed by removal or capture, respectively, of an electron. In contrast, addition of a proton or cation to a neutral molecule gives molecular adduct ions. Deprotonated molecules are considered as fragments. Although reproducibility or precision is a key figure of merit in MS, there is no agreed format for quoting it. The reader can assume that values of precision given in this Update as a percentage correspond to the RSD unless otherwise specified. For isotope ratios, however, values of precision are generally given as the SD of a permil value.
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