Guideline for increasing the analysis quality in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Highlights: • Many varying factors prevent LIBS inter-comparison. • We propose a guideline to increase the analysis quality in LIBS. • The guideline includes a series of good practices and figures of merit. • This guideline enables to compare models for sorting or quantification. • This guideline enables further inter-laboratory comparisons. -- Abstract: Despite well-established advantages and a growing number of applications, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) still fails to be recognized as a robust analytical technique, especially because many factors varying from an experimental setup to the other are preventing from any inter-comparison. The present paper is a guideline for increasing the quality of the LIBS analyses through a series of good practices, assessments and reporting along five key-steps being: i) monitoring of the LIBS signal, ii) optimization of the measurement conditions, iii) data filtering, iv) sorting, and v) quantification. This guideline offers an opportunity to increase the quality of the LIBS analysis and represents a significant step towards a standardization process. In addition, it allows comparing intra as well as inter-laboratory LIBS results.