Importance of ICPMS for speciation analysis is changing: future trends for targeted and non-targeted element speciation analysis.

This article is aimed at researchers interested in organic molecules which contain a heteroatom but who have never considered using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS) or who have used ICPMS for years and developed numerous methods for analysis of target elemental species. We try to illustrate (1) that ICPMS has been very useful for speciation analysis of metal(loid) target species and that there is now a trend to replace the costly detector with cheaper detection systems for routine target analysis, and (2) that ICPMS has been used and will be used even more in the future for non-targeted analysis of elements which are not normally associated with ICPMS analysis, such as non-metals such as sulfur, phosphorus, chlorine and fluorine. Graphical Abstract Starting with HPLC-ICPMS for non-targeted analysis of heteroatom containing molecules, once target molecule is identified alternative detectors can be used for routine measurements.