Are the last half century’s worth of results from widely-used spectroscopy tool wrong?

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is one of the most widely-used techniques to detect and identify molecules on surfaces, and its use has grown dramatically in recent years. However, the standard technique used to calibrate XPS on semiconducting or insulating surfaces is worse than useless, say two spectrocopists, and as a result countless suspect results have entered the literature.¹