Fresenius Z. Anal. Chem. 300, 8 (1980)
Trends in Analytical Chemistry J. T. Clerc Pharm. Inst. der Univ. Bern, Sahlistr. 10, CH-3000 Bern
Increasing performance together with decreasing prices for modern electronic devices continues to greatly affect Analytical Chemistry. The introduction of computer techniques has influenced the instrumental design and has led to new sophisticated methods of measurements and to the modification of existing methods. The main results of the widespread application of computers and microprocessors in Analytical Chemistry are better precision, higher throughput, and improved operator comfort. Due to various reasons (e.g. environmental protection, new government regulations, tighter product specifications) the number of samples to be processed has seen a similar increase. Consequently, technical progress is balanced by increased load. The overall result is a tremendous growth in the amount of data to be processed, stored, retrieved, and interpreted. Without modern data processing methods these operations may soon become the bottleneck that limits the overall productivity of analytical laboratories. Consequently, a significant part of the future research activities in Analytical Chemistry should be directed towards the development of methods for the computer-aided interpretation of analytical data and of chemical information systems. In this field there are many interesting problems still awaiting a solution.
Some general topics include computer storage and handling of chemical structures, identification of substances using spectral data with methods more sophisticated than simple spectra comparison, and design of comprehensive data banks listing analytical procedures for the determination of various compounds in different matrices and at different concentration levels. Common to most of these problems is the fact that they require extensive manipulation of predominantly non-numeric information (as opposed to the processing of numeric data, i.e. calculating). Numerical computer methods are well developed, and most modern universities include this topic in the chemistry curriculum. Methods for the computer representation and manipulation of non-numeric chemical information are, however, still rather crude, as today but very few universities offer courses and do research in this field. Chemical industry does more in this respect, but the results are in general not published in full. The time now seems ripe to stop grumbling about the information explosion and start doing something against it. One first step could be to introduce courses on chemical informatics at the universities and to encourage serious research work. I am sure that the editor of this journal will be happy to accept for publication good research papers from this field.
