Comparison between heavy metal concentrations in sediments analysed by two methods: Analyses on detection limits and data quality

The current geochemical database may be sufficient for some aspects of mineral exploration, but not for other geochemical studies, such as baseline database construction and environmental investigations. Better results could have been achieved by initial error checking and correction, improvement on the detection limits of INAA, and improvement on the acid digestion for AAS. It is possible that other geochemical databases contain similar data quality issues demonstrated in this one. This study demonstrates how straightforward statistical methods can be applied to check/verify the quality of geochemical databases.