Assay and Geochemical Labs Editing and Proofreading Services

A certificate of analysis reports 4.2 grams per tonne gold for a sample, and the geologist receiving it enters the number directly into a resource model. What the certificate does not surface, because it is recorded in a separate QA/QC batch report nobody cross-checked, is that the duplicate pair for this exact interval returned 2.1 grams per tonne, a discrepancy well outside acceptable limits, and that the standard reference material run in the same batch was itself out of range. The number was real. Whether it should have been trusted was a separate question the certificate never actually answered.

We edit what assay and geochemical laboratories produce — certificates of analysis and their accompanying QA/QC batch reports, standard reference material and blank performance summaries, duplicate and check-sample discrepancy flags, method detection limit and technique disclosures, chain-of-custody documentation, and the correspondence explaining a re-assay or a flagged result to a client. Our editors work on the number that becomes a resource estimate if nobody stops to question it first.

The QA/QC flag attached to the result is what tells a geologist whether a number can be trusted, and its failure is a certificate presenting a value with its quality control filed separately where nobody will cross-reference it. A result and its QA/QC performance are two different documents answering one question, and separated, the question never actually gets answered by either. We work through these so any duplicate pair, standard, or blank falling outside the lab's stated acceptance criteria is flagged directly against the specific sample interval it affects, rather than buried in a batch-level summary the client has to manually cross-reference against a sample list; so the acceptance criteria themselves are stated specifically — a percentage difference for duplicates, a control range for standards — given that "within acceptable limits" means nothing without the actual number defining acceptable; so a flagged result states plainly what it means for reliance on that specific value, since a client needs to know whether to use the number, treat it as provisional, or request a re-assay, not simply that a flag exists somewhere in the batch; so the analytical method and its detection limit are stated per result, because a value near a detection limit carries different confidence than one well within the method's reliable range; so chain-of-custody gaps are disclosed rather than assumed unbroken, given that a sample's history matters as much as its analysis; and so a re-assay report states explicitly how it relates to the original result — confirms, contradicts, supersedes — rather than simply providing a second number for the client to reconcile themselves. Certificates written this way tell a geologist not just what the rock contains, but how much to trust the number.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including sample data, analytical results and client information. We are editors rather than geochemists, lab technicians or geologists, and we offer no view on analytical methods, results or resource estimation. What we can do is make sure the certificate says how much the result should be trusted.