Who publishes this, and why it matters
The disclosure comes first, because it changes how you should read everything else.
Disclosure. This reference is published by VERAX Research, a company that supplies research compounds. That is a direct commercial interest in the subject matter. This is not an independent publication and does not claim to be one — a supplier explaining how to audit suppliers is an interested party, and you should weight it accordingly.
The premise
Certificates of analysis circulate far outside the laboratories that produce them. They get posted, screenshotted, cited and relied on by people who have never been shown how to read one — and a certificate is a narrow technical document that is very easy to read as saying more than it does.
This reference explains the class of document: what the underlying measurements establish, which fields can be omitted without the omission being visible, and which questions a report is structurally incapable of answering.
Why publish it anyway
The obvious objection is that a supplier has an incentive to define "a good certificate" as whatever its own certificates happen to contain. That objection is fair and it is the reason this page exists.
The mitigation is that the standards described here are checkable against sources that have nothing to do with us: the operating principles of chromatography and mass spectrometry, compendial test definitions, and the published text of ISO/IEC 17025. Nothing on this site asks you to take our word for it, and the independence page applies its test to us as readily as to anyone else.
What this site does not do
- Nothing is sold here. No catalogue, no prices, no cart, no checkout.
- It links to no product. No links to our own shop, and none to anyone else's.
- It recommends no supplier. Including us. No directory, no rankings, no referrals.
- It endorses no laboratory. Laboratories named in the reference records are fictitious.
- It gives no medical, dosing or handling guidance. Out of scope, permanently.
- It certifies nothing. No analysis is performed here and no reports are issued.
These are structural constraints on the publication, not editorial preferences. A reference that routes readers toward a purchase is advertising with footnotes, and it would not be worth reading.
The records in the lookup tool are teaching material. They are prefixed
EXAMPLE-, they describe no real lot, and the laboratories named in them do not
exist. Nothing here should be read as a finding about any real product, supplier or
laboratory — ours included.
Tracking
The site sets no cookies, loads no analytics, and embeds no advertising or social pixels. Nothing about a visit is recorded beyond ordinary web server logs. See the privacy notice.
Corrections
Analytical chemistry has edge cases and this reference will contain errors. Corrections that identify a specific claim and the basis for the correction are welcome and are applied with a dated note on the page concerned. See the editorial policy for how sourcing and revisions are handled.