Quantifying selectivity in spectrophotometric multicomponent analysis

According to the latest recommendation of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, "selectivity refers to the extent to which the method can be used to determine particular analytes in mixtures or matrices without interferences from other components of similar behavior". Because of the prime importance of selectivity as an analytical figure of merit, numerous proposals have been published on how to quantify it in spectrophotometric multicomponent analysis. We show that the criterion independently developed by Lorber [11,12] and Bergmann, von Oepen and Zinn [13] is the most suitable, because it directly relates to prediction uncertainty and allows for a consistent generalization to more complex systems of chemical analysis