Despite the amount of data available and the effort that has been put into studying the binding of trace elements by humic substances, there is still a significant amount of uncertainty surrounding the validity and applicability of the existing values in solving particular problems in the environmental, toxicity and industrial fields. This paper discusses the problems associated with the characterisation of humic binding and proposes a general approach for quality assessing trace element-humic substances complexation data, which includes the normalisation of raw experimental data prior to any data treatment (modelling
