02995 IUPAC Gold Book - inaccuracy 10.1351/goldbook.I02995 I02995 current 1 A quantitative term to describe the (lack of) accuracy of a chemical measurement process; comprises the imprecision and the bias. Inaccuracy must be viewed as a two-component quantity (vector); imprecision and bias should never be combined to give a scalar measure for chemical measurement process inaccuracy. (One or the other component may, however, be negligible under certain circumstances.) Inaccuracy should not be confused with uncertainty. Inaccuracy (imprecision, bias) is characteristic of the measurement process, whereas error and uncertainty are characteristics of a result. (The latter characteristic, of course, derives from the imprecision and bounds for bias of the chemical measurement process.) The resultant bias and imprecision for the overall measurement process generally arise from several individual components, some of which act multiplicatively (e.g. sensitivity), and some of which act additively (e.g. the blank). bias https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/M03796 chemical measurement process https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/C01030 imprecision https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/I02991 sensitivity https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/S05606 PAC, 1989, 61, 1657. 'Nomenclature for automated and mechanised analysis (Recommendations 1989)' on page 1663 (https://doi.org/10.1351/pac198961091657) PAC, 1995, 67, 1699. 'Nomenclature in evaluation of analytical methods including detection and quantification capabilities (IUPAC Recommendations 1995)' on page 1706 (https://doi.org/10.1351/pac199567101699) https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/I02995/html https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/I02995/json https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/I02995/plain Citation: 'inaccuracy' 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.I02995 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. 2026-06-07T03:10:20+00:00