We live in an age where the local phone book is being replaced by the local Yahoo directory or even a Google search. Since 1998, has been receiving requests for analysis from people around the world. From small shops to governments, from the trivial (if not specious) request to major analytical contracts...we have seen them all. This article attempts to summarize who is looking for chemical analysis on the internet by looking at approximately 200 analytical requests from the last year.
About fifty percent of the analytical requests they received came from small companies of ten or fewer employees. Only ten percent of the companies had more than 500 employees.
The single largest requesting industry was manufacturing. Fourteen percent of the requests specified 'other' as the industry in which they operated. Science, pharmaceutical, and R&D companies submitted a combined 26 percent of the requests.
Nearly a quarter of these requests were research and development based. Sixteen percent of the requests were for pharmaceutical analyses, and ten percent fell into the "QA/QC" rubric. The remaining requests varied greatly. Seventy-eight percent came from the United States. The remainder of the requests came from all over the world.
