Title: reference material certificate
Long Title: IUPAC Gold Book - reference material certificate
DOI: 10.1351/goldbook.08117
Status: current

Definition
Document, issued by a reference material producer, containing the essential information for the use of a certified reference material and confirming that the necessary procedures have been carried out to ensure the validity and traceability of the stated property values.

Notes
1) A reference material certificate is usually valid for a stated period of time ("period of validity" or as described by its "expiry date"), which defines the shelf life of the certified reference material.
2) Documents containing the information described above may not, for legal or other (non-technical) reasons, be termed "certificate" (compare Note 1 to certified reference material).
3) ISO Guide 31 is the guidance document to the required and recommended content of a reference material certificate.
4) In this definition, "traceability" covers both metrological traceability of a measurement result and examination traceability, but not object traceability.

Related Terms
- object traceability: https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/08037
- reference material producer: https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/08120
- shelf life: https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/08046

Source
- PAC, 2021, 93, 997. 'Metrological and quality concepts in analytical chemistry (IUPAC Recommendations 2021)' on page 1038 (https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2019-0819)

Other Outputs
- html: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/08117/html
- json: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/08117/json
- xml: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/08117/xml

Citation: Citation: 'reference material certificate' in IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 5th ed. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; 2025. Online version 5.0.0, 2025. 10.1351/goldbook.08117
License: The IUPAC Gold Book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) for individual terms.
Collection: If you are interested in licensing the Gold Book for commercial use, please contact the IUPAC Executive Director at executivedirector@iupac.org .
Disclaimer: The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is continuously reviewing and, where needed, updating terms in the Compendium of Chemical Terminology (the IUPAC Gold Book). Users of these terms are encouraged to include the version of a term with its use and to check regularly for updates to term definitions that you are using.
Accessed: 2026-07-23T08:10:40+00:00