Chemists in research and development laboratories have relatively few published resources on the design and analysis of experiments. In recent years massive changes have occurred in the tools and instrumentation at their disposal, in the scale of databases linking the properties of pure materials, solutions or other mixtures to molecular structure, and in the sheer ability to collect data through automated data acquisition systems. Despite these advances, many chemists still apply only rudimentary data analysis techniques and remain unaware of the advances made in information extraction over the last decade.

Design and Analysis in Chemical Research provides the means to overcome that problem. An international panel of contributors address the principles of design and analysis in chemical research and development, with a thoughtful, user-friendly approach. Organized in chapters dealing with major activities, this volume generates understanding through numerous examples and practical applications drawn from research and development chemistry. The authors concentrate on principles and interpretation rather than formal derivation and proof, and adopt the unifying theme that statistics and chemometrics are essentially extensions of the logical processes used every day by chemists. Thus, they allow a greater understanding of problems more quickly and easily than purely intuitive methods.