A physical entity which contains material intended to be investigated.
The terms specimen and sample are used widely interchangeable in the community. In some cases a sample might be thought of as something which is statistically representative of the parent material/sample where it was taken from while a specimen is not. However, this statistical value is not an inherent property of the sample but of the feature that was characterized. Therefore, this the relevance of this distinction depends on the application case. During discussions a large majority of contributors favoured these terms to be implemented as synonyms in this glossary.It should also be noted that one often probes special anomalies, such as specific locations of the parent material. Furthermore, if the properties of a specimen are assumed to be the same as they were at the time when a specimen was taken from the parental material, they still might change over time. A specimen may not be reproducible in time, e.g. it may be taken from a flowing stream or a portion of blood, no separable sampling error exists since this error is unavoidably included with the corresponding error of the estimate of the property, function being studied. The term is used across fields, i.e. in clinical, biological, geological, and materials science studies.
Please cite as:
Comments: