Furthermore, errors, misconceptions, and bad curve-fitting practices accounted for most of the serious problems in both the measured XPS data and the spectral analysis that were identified in more than 30% of the papers analyzed. 2,3 In an ongoing study of XPS data in three high profile journals, 3 it was observed that roughly 70% of the papers using XPS analyzed the data using some type of curve fitting. The absence of a distinct theoretical description of XPS fitting has led to the publication of erroneous conclusions about surface chemistry. 2 Despite computational advances and higher accessibility of software resources, it has been challenging to develop a chemically and physically meaningful approach to curve fitting. 1 Curve fitting has been widely used for more than 50 years for extracting chemical information from the overlapping features in high-resolution XPS spectra. Over the past 30 years, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) has become the most widely used surface analysis tool and has been an essential component of many research studies.
