Issue 9, 2008 of JAAS contains selected articles presented at the 2008 Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry, held in January 2008, in Temecula, US.  JAAS supports this important annual meeting presenting new developments in all aspects of plasma spectrochemistry with a themed issue each year. 

This issue contains 10 Papers and 8 Technical Notes, including a Hot Article by Petr Smíd, Edward Steers, Zdenìk Weiss, Juliet Pickering and Volker Hoffmann which describes the effects of hydrogen and nitrogen on intensities of atomic emission lines of iron and titanium in analytical glow discharges.

Featured on the front cover of this issue is an article by Martin Resano and colleagues which illustrates the use of LA-single collector-DRC ICPMS for the discrimination among Spanish antique lead-glazed ceramics.

The inside cover highlights a paper by Jim Holcombe and co-workers and represents how crucial internal standard choice is for the correction of errors in ICPMS. 

For an overview of the 2008 Winter Conference, please see Ramon M. Barnes' Editorial.