"Analytical chemistry is a scientific discipline that develops and applies methods, instruments, and strategies to obtain information on the composition and nature of matter in space and time"

The analytical chemist operates in a wide variety of professions of our society. Many decisions are made on the basis of results obtained by chemical analysis. Think of it! Your health is monitored by clinical analysis, and the level of pharmaceuticals supplied

to you at the chemist is decided on the basis of analytical chemistry. In sports, the analyses of blood samples and of urine samples are performed by analytical chemists, who are responsible for reporting the level of doping to the authorities. Such results must be of high quality as to ensure a fair treatment of the people involved. Similarly, the application of analytical chemistry to forensic analysis allows the decision of legal court cases to be made by analytical results. Thus, quality assurance constitutes an integrated part of analytical chemistry.

The application of quality assurance is also important to other fields of chemical sciences because it allows the researchers to decide the correct molar ratios of molecular species for modeling of fundamental mechanisms in nature. An analytical laboratory is equipped with many different technologies that allow analysis of inorganic species, of organic species or of biochemical compounds.