The aim of this textbook is not to provide you, the reader, with large numbers
of correlation tables for every form of spectroscopy used by organic chemists;
nor is it designed to give you an in-depth understanding of the physical
processes that occur when molecules interact with electromagnetic radiation.
What we hope to do in this textbook is to provide you with a basic
understanding of how each type of spectroscopy gives rise to spectra, and
how these spectra can be used to determine the structure of organic
molecules. This text is aimed at undergraduate students in Years 1 and 2, and
is meant to provide an introduction to organic spectroscopic analysis,
leading to an appreciation of the information available from each form of
spectroscopy and an ability to use spectroscopic information in the
identification of organic compounds.
We will concentrate upon the most commonly used techniques in organic
structure determination: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), infrared (TR)
and ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy, and mass spectrometry (MS).
The amount of' space devoted to each technique in this text is nieant to be
representative of their current usage for structure determination.