Searching for Shimadzu in the Scientific Literature ??
....KEEP LOOKING !!!!!!
There are a few clueless Shimadzu cheerleaders (no doubt Shimadzu employees) who mistakenly trumpet the alleged quality of Shimadzu equipment. Frequent and casual readers of this forum know all too well about the other side of Shimadzu (eg. inferior product offerings, non-existent tech support, substandard service work, non-stop equipment maintenance, software that should be labeled bugware, etc). With instrumentation of such low grade quality, is it any wonder that one rarely finds a scientific article where Shimadzu equipment is referenced in the Materials & Methods part of the publication?
This brings us to the most recent issue of “The Application Notebook” which is a quarterly supplement to LC/GC magazine (June 2005). If you haven’t seen a copy of the current issue, you are missing out on the “latest and greatest” techniques for analyzing a wide range of biomolecules from the biological, chiral, environmental, food & beverage, industrial, nutraceutical and pharmaceutical industries. There are published techniques from proven instrumentation leaders like Agilent, Dionex, Jasco, JEOL, LECO, OI Analytical, Perkin-Elmer, Thermo Electron, Varian and Waters.
What you won’t find in the current issue of “The Application Notebook” is mention of any scientific articles or techniques authored by Shimadzu. Why is that? If that fabled Shimadzu equipment is so good (as some misguided Shimadzu loyalists would have us all believe), then there should be voluminous mention of their equipment in the scientific literature…. but it’s just isn’t so!
As a result, it wouldn’t be a huge leap to conclude that this faulty and problem-prone Shimadzu equipment is being weeded out by the scientific community during the peer-review process. Some might think that this is a scientific conspiracy directed at Shimadzu. Nothing could be further from the truth! Too bad that Shimadzu doesn’t see nor understand how inferior their piss-poor product offerings really are. In an effort to boost their beleaguered reputation, one would think they might set their in-house support folks to do more research, writing and publishing. The problem with this scenario is that the in-house support staff are just too damn busy putting out the forest fires that develop in the field at their customer sites.
So the next time you’re considering any Shimadzu equipment, you
should also be considering whether you will be able to publish your prized work. Remember:
$h*t IN, $h*t OUT…. that’s the kind of science that Shimadzu has been mastering
for over a 100 years now!
You demand performance and productivity.... Shimadzu DOESN'T Deliver!
This page was last 
07/31/05