Abstract

The major trend evident in this year's review is the continued decline in publications dealing with applications of glow discharges, chemometrics and fundamental studies of all types of plasmas used for atomic spectroscopy. There has been an increase in the number of publications dealing with speciation studies compared with last year, particularly dealing with applications, which possibly reflects the growing maturity and acceptance of the field into the mainstream. There were also a considerable number of reviews in this area. The number of papers dealing with preconcentration and matrix removal, and laser based spectroscopy, stayed at levels comparable with recent years, but there was a decline in applications dealing with solid sampling using glow discharges and laser ablation. Routine applications of ETAAS and FAAS were numerous (and not dealt with in this review) and novel developments were few, though several important reviews of fundamental processes in ETAAS were published.