10004 IUPAC Gold Book - examination uncertainty 10.1351/goldbook.10004 10004 current 1 Fraction of examined values that is different from a reference nominal property value among all the examined values provided. Examination uncertainty is a quantity that is complementary to examination trueness. Examination uncertainty is a part of an examination result. With exception of the situation where the examination uncertainty is zero, some examined values differ from the reference nominal property value. In a comment to the examination result, the laboratory can provide information about other possible nominal property values, based on the information available. The reference nominal property value is "B". The nominal property value set of all possible nominal property values is {A, B}. For one of 10 examinations the examined value differs from "B". The examination uncertainty is therefore 0.1 (\(\pu{10\%}\)). A patient suffers from a urinary tract infection. The examination result from the examination procedure is growth of bacteria of the species E. coli in a sample of urine with \(\pu{20\%}\) examination uncertainty. With knowledge and experience from the examination procedure it can be concluded that there is some probability that the true species of bacteria could be instead a Salmonella or Shigella species, while the probability that the reference nominal property value is some other species of bacteria is very low. examination procedure https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/09990 examination result https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/09999 examination trueness https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/10003 examinations https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/09984 examined values https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/10000 nominal property value set https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/09997 nominal property values https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/09996 reference nominal property value https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/09998 PAC, 2018, 90, 913. 'Vocabulary on nominal property, examination, and related concepts for clinical laboratory sciences (IFCC-IUPAC Recommendations 2017)' on page 923 (https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2011-0613) https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/10004/html https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/10004/json https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/10004/plain Citation: 'examination uncertainty' 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.10004 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. If you are interested in licensing the Gold Book for commercial use, please contact the IUPAC Executive Director at executivedirector@iupac.org . 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. 2026-05-06T18:54:55+00:00