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Inst.f.Chromatography

Planar Chromatography Literature Sources

The first
English book on High Performance Planar Chromatography HPTLC from the coauthors J. Blome-Au, Germany, H. Halpaap-MERCK Darmstadt, Germany,
U.B. Hezel-CarlZeiss-Oberkochen, Germany, D. Jaenchen CAMAG-Muttenz, Switzerland, J. Ripphahn-MERCK Darmstadt, Germany and this author was edited by A. Zlatkis-Houston, Texas, USA and R. E. Kaiser, IfC-Bad Duerkheim.
It was published in 1977 as Journal of Chromatography Library Volume 9 by Elsevier Scientific Publ. Company and by Institute of Chromatography in Bad Duerkheim.

In 2006 a PLC book on High-Performance Thin-Layer Chromatography
for the Analysis of Medical plants (a new complete reference) was authored by E.Reich and A. Schibli Muttenz-Switzerland and published by Thieme New York in 2006 (ISBN 1-58890-409-1). To get it contact marcel.hug@camag.com.

The latest PLC book on Quantitative Thin-Layer Chromatography - A Practical Survey - authored by B. Spangenberg, C. F. Poole and Ch. Weins was published by Springer Heidelberg Dordrecht London New York in 2011 (ISBN 978-3-642-10727-6; DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-10729-0; e-ISBN 978-3-642-10729-0)

In between these nearly 30 years several other books have been written and printed. A look into one of the well organized search engines in the INTERNET gives most often complete book details including size and the price.

The latest PLC book planar-chromatography-by-kaiser.com is now in front of you on a hopefully good screen. Its price: several hundred mouse clicks.

To know more about books the use of Google or FIREBALL, to mention only two of more than a million INTERNET search engines, is often a good idea. It is important to ask however the correct question clever enough.  Questions and answers are shown here in a few examples. The author uses something like “private” questions for answers so that he is able to check for systematic search errors. Search engines overdo regularly. This is caused by interested authors, companies & providers who work with some non visible INTERNET tricks.

A simple test is to ask GOOGLE for the topic in connection with the own name, as the analyst very probably remembers what she/he ever published. This gives an uncertainty number about the accuracy of the Google answers, at least in the size of sources. But a huge amount of systematically wrong names, numbers, addresses and more is not too rare.

Example:  Through the search engine www.google.com :
question= “planar chromatography kaiser”
answer: 3780 publications (articles, papers, books)
Correct ?  Definitively not. Some 15 % of this value might be correct which       would be around 600. 85 % of answers are spider tricks. There are many authors also named Kaiser.
Enter a sharper
question= “planar chromatography r.e.kaiser”
answer: 620. Well: too much to make full use of. But the add-on information is often valuable and may support own analytical tasks.
Enter an even more sharp
question= “planar chromatography books r.e.kaiser”
answer: 244. Again too large, but looking at details in the answers one
realizes, the sharper the question the more correct is the answer.
answer: 120. 50 % from 120 = 60 may be correct now and includes monographs and co-authored books.

The search time is very short. Using these engines is most often better than a visit in the library, especially as today libraries have no longer the service available to keep each newly published book on display for some weeks or months.

There are millions of search engines as already mentioned above - google is the largest. Asking google for its competitors we quickly find also FIREBALL. www.fireball.de is fast working, offers clear text well readable, delivers quick answers to questions like those mentioned above with nearly equal size:
Question= “planar chromatography”; answer 33.300
Question= “planar chromatography r.e.kaiser”; answer 781
Question= “HPTLC”; answer 9900
Question= “HPTLC r.e.kaiser”; answer 640.

When searching for literature the INTERNET informs very specifically. Whilst FIREBALL mentions very often CAMAG, Muttenz, Switzerland, which is the world leader in modern instrumentation,  CAMAGs competitors have not used their own specific “tags” in the INTERNET. CAMAG uses its company information very well and offers a good access to literature by a click on
                 http://www.camag.com/v/literature/reading.html .
You may realize, that the companies advice for reading literature is however quite specific or lets say “special”. Some more critical books or literature sources not based on CAMAG hardware are not listed as an advice - of course. A clever type of systematic error ? So far with books.

Answers to specific analytical questions, methods, phases etc. are also available now more and more through the INTERNET. Especially the following literature sources are quality checked by top TLC / HPTLC chromatographers.

Most helpful and unique as well as very highly qualified is the CAMAG library service CBS . A very good example of the CBS service is available by click on
       http://www.camag.com/downloads/free/cbs/CBS96-yellow-pages.pdf

CBS contains more than 8000 abstracts of publications between 1982 and today.

CCBS, the Cumulative CAMAG Bibliography Service, is now available in its recent version and can be downloaded free of charge. This makes decisions about the commercial side of buying 25 years CBS issues or at least the latest 6 ones quite easy.
Going to the library is very much more cheaper than any test experiment as far as made by TLC/HPTLC standard hardware. In case of compare analysis however when no any substance identification is necessary, a µ-PLC test looks even more economical than library visits or asking some of the many search engines
NOTE the limitation mentioned: “when no identification is necessary”.  

Last but not least:

The absolute MUST for each PLC user is reading JPC, the only International Journal of Planar Chromatography. Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief for 19 years was SZ. NYIREDY (1950-2006). We together founded JPC in 1988 in Bad Duerkheim. The painful loss of our highly appreciated and successful colleague Professor Szabolcs Nyiredy in 2006 made it necessary to change the editorial board.
Prof. Bernd Spangenberg, Editor-in-Chief of JPC since 2007,  will now carry this journal forward to keep the tradition of 113 issues alive. Since 2007 Akademiai Kiado-Budapest, Hungary is the publishing house for JPC. They prepared the electronic version of the Journal of Planar Chromatography - just click on JPC

This SITE contains the new issues as well as the archives back to 2001. All interested chromatographers irrespective of their workplace (universities, institutes, manufactories) can have a free 30 day trial access to the whole
full-text content according to the Publishing Editor of JPC, Dr. Balazs Reffy of Akademiai Kiado-Budapest. Participants of important conferences will also have this possibility.

May I advice HPLC-only analysts to regularly have a look into JPC ? It would help them to keep their own reputation on top. MUCH cheaper, faster, more accurate analytical data are available by checking the purity of the main peak. Especially the SAFETY about their analytical results may then remain in their own hands. “POP” is a widely unknown fundamental analytical value for HPLC AND HPLC/MS- only users as POP (Purity-Of-mainPeak) is the molar-% or the weight-% of the content of the main peak with respect to the really identified chemical main  substance. If POP is 95% than 5% of non identified substance is “under” the main peak. That means, that the quantitation is wrong by 5 % and a may be unwanted by product is not yet under control. POP is available by a quantitative µ-PLC analysis of the collected HPLC main peak. Just the eluate is sampled circular, dried, focused and re chromatographed. 1 ml eluate (or less) would do it. As this way the chromatographic phases used in HPLC differ fundamentally from the ones used in PLC the probability to separate the main peak from the up-to-now unknowns is very high. POP is a clickword. The critical book “analytical artifacts GC, MS, HPLC, TLC and PC”, Journal of Chromatography Library - volume 44” from Brian S. Middleditch, Houston-Texas is with more than 1000 pages directly available in the internet - go through GOOGLE with the search word analytical artifacts. Quite some parts of this material would help NOT to believe that MS and MS/MS “does it” in all cases.

All chromatography modes of analysis are easily prone to systematic errors as chromatography itself acts always and everywhere in keeping back specific materials from your sample or adding stuff about which you may know nothing, thus already falsifying later results prior to the start of your own work. This continues at preparing and giving the now already changed sample. It may not stop when you let separate and detect substances. This error chain can become quite long but it can be broken however at best again by chromatography. Thus a TLC / PLC user should know well HPLC and GC in addition to heir/his specialty.

You may be interested in a SITE which is specialized on discussing sources of systematic chromatography errors as well as modes to detect and reduce them. There is not much available in the huge world of chromatography knowledge as here we are confronted with something nobody likes too much.

By a click on this line: GC/HPLC/TLC/HPTLC errors you start making your own analytical results the best value for your scientific partners. As all following decision are only as correct as your results.
 

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