ABSTRACT
With the advent of ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometers, a new opportunity appeared for the qualitative and quantitative estimation of a great variety of drugs in the UV region without preliminary transformation to colored derivatives. Although the instrumentation for scanning ultraviolet and visible spectra were available in the 1910s and at that time spectra of several pharmaceutical compounds were becoming available, the operation of contemporary spectrophotometers was so clumsy that they were quite unsuitable for use in routine pharmaceutical analysis laboratories. As is characteristic of classical methods which continue to be both widely used and subject to further development, the application of spectrophotometry in pharmaceutical analysis has a very broad literature. The spectrophotometric method is applicable to stability testing of pharmaceutical products only if it can be made sufficiently selective for undegraded material or decomposition products. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
