Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
A preliminary round robin test to evaluate available computer search/match has been carried out and comparisons made with handsearching techniques. Participants in the teat were all experienced diffractionists and a variety of data collection instrumentation was employed. Hand-searching and computer searching were found to be equally efficient, about 70-80%, for the mineral and inorganic samples provided that the quality of the “d” values was good (1 in 1000). Although the computer methods were much quicker, they were found to be much more sensitive to the quality of the “d” values. Where elemental data was used to assist in computer searching, much poorer “d“ values (3 in 1000) were acceptable. Hand-searching was found to be vastly superior to computer searching for the organic specimen.