Lab Readout

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Reference material on reading laboratory documents.

Nothing here is published yet. Rather than fill this page with unreviewed articles, here are the topics being written and what each will cover.

Status: in preparation. Each topic gets a named reviewer and a review date before it goes up, and an article will only ever show a reviewer when a qualified person has actually reviewed it.
  1. 1

    What a Certificate of Analysis is

    Who issues one, what it covers, and what it deliberately leaves out.

  2. 2

    Reading batch identifiers

    Lot, batch and reference numbers, and how a report is tied to material.

  3. 3

    Methods and reported results

    What HPLC, MS and related methods measure, and how results are stated.

  4. 4

    Purity versus content

    Two different measurements that are often read as the same number.

  5. 5

    Missing information

    The fields whose absence changes how much a document can support.

  6. 6

    Issuer-record checks

    What it means to check a report against the record of the lab that issued it.

The COA Reading Kit covers most of this ground already, as a single PDF. Request the kit if you would rather not wait.

Or start with a document you already have.

Upload a Certificate of Analysis and read the explanation against the page it came from.

Analyze a COA Get the free Reading Kit