Best-Practice Reporting for Porous Materials Adsorption Data

Recent decades have seen an enormous evolution of novel porous materials for catalysis, energy efficient processes, and sustainable technologies to improve life quality. Adsorption characterization is essential to provide descriptors of material texture and functionality. Modern science relies on digital data reporting making such data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible (FAIR). This perspective addresses current methodology and the tools for reporting essential adsorption metadata and primary data in a digital format. Guidelines for the publication of experimental and computer simulated data are provided. A number of shortcomings in traditional reporting schemes and ambiguous units is discussed. The importance of quantity definitions is emphasized to avoid misinterpretation and enhance reproducibility. Documenting high-quality adsorption data based on a self-defining text archive and retrieval (STAR) file format is illustrated via examples to establish a best-practice in the field. The adsorption information file (AIF) captures primary data and metadata in a standardized human readable and editable STAR format.