There is an interesting mass-to-charge ratio discussion on Wikipedia that illustrates a point I brought up in my ACS presentation last month (see also the Nature/Wikipedia/Britanica imbroglio). Wikipedia is open to editing by anyone and is peer reviewed only if ones peers choose to review and edit it. It will be interesting to see whether the scientific community embraces or rejects (or some combination) the open source approach to scientific information on the internet.
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Interesting? I was offended by most arguments. You are right, though, we need to clean up the m/z mess. Future generations of mass spectrometrists will benefit from a real unit and why not Th?
Next thing the community should fight are ppm..ppq. I would prefer Th/s*mm^2 instead since it would allow a direct comparison between quadrupole and sector field instruments. 😉
“Interesting” is the NPOV way to put it. It is good to see the discussion and I hope that the MS community will realize that stuff is happening over at Wikipedia.
There’s some more discussion over here and here.
The Gold Book calls m/z an abbreviation rather than a symbol or unit, so I don’t think that the Green Book rules apply.
It is very unfortunate that the IUPAC does not provide a better and more consistent definition of the mass-to-charge ratio. Mass-to-charge ratio is a physical quantity and needs to be defined according to the rules of the IUPAC green book, i.e. based on the seven base quantities. In the gold book m/z is defined as an “abbreviation of a quantity”, therefore it needs to be in line with the IUPAC green book about quantities. The current mess caused by poor IUPAC definition is not acceptable.