Scientific methodology in analytical chemistry

Abstract

Ever since the work of Robert Boyle, scientists have used the same methodology to obtain new information about mechanisms of nature. Together with other scientists at the time, Robert Boyle suggested that all scientific discussions could be settled by means of experiments. Without proper tools of statistics, it was difficult to arrive at any conclusive decisions in many cases. However, later discoveries of statistical tools have limited dissemination of flawed discoveries of nature but to a great number of scientists, these results have not been understood or recognized. This poses a major issue in science and it can be shown that some publications do not meet requirements of credibility and reliability, owing to scientific misconduct. Journals thrive on scientists who wish to publish results where data have been seriously manipulated. At present time, it seems like scientific methodology has been forgotten, which may explain the lack of ground breaking development in science? The quest for quality assurance in science is greater than ever, and initiatives of the European Commission constitute the first steps towards an environment that might bring back scientific methodology to science. Unfortunately, guidelines published by the European Commission do not underpin scientific methodology, and it has become evident that science and industry use two different concepts of scientific methodology that cannot both be true. Therefore, it is suggested to improve the guidelines of the European Commission to a level of simplicity and transparency that allows scientists to perform reliable method validations and obtain correspondence between experimental uncertainty and predicted uncertainty, which is so fundamental to scientific methodology. It is proposed that new methods of quality assurance should be embraced by not only analytical chemistry but also by other fields of science.