Quo vadis, chemometrics?

Assessing current trends in chemometric publications reveals that most projects utilize known methodologies and fall into the category “application.” There seems to be worrying little of true innovation unless one counts “fashions” assimilated from other fields. The field may have reached a crossroad: One path leads to chemometrics becoming a fully mature but stagnant tool for analytical chemists; the other path, that is, maintaining chemometrics as an active and widely recognized research field, requires opening new research areas for chemometricians. It is argued that hard modeling as opposed to the ubiquitous soft modeling may become such a new direction. Hard modeling would focus on investigating chemical mechanisms that give raise to measured data as opposed to empirically analyzing data.Furthermore, chemometricians in academia are responsible for preparing the next generation of chemometricians. Despite the need for chemometricians in the workforce, the number of young chemometricians is low and will remain low unless changes in chemistry curricula happen. This remains a challenge because there are fundamental issues that need to be overcome. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.