O uso de produtos extraídos de plantas para fins medicinais pode ser tracejado aos inícios da civilização e até o fim do século XIX, os produtos naturais constituíram a principal fonte de medicamentos. Desde então, a importância relativa dos produtos naturais tem oscilado de acordo com as estratégias de grandes companhias farmacêuticas. Agora que estas estratégias vêm mudando, há novas oportunidades para países como o Brasil, no qual está localizada uma vasta proporção da biodiversidade mundial. Há, entretanto, novas circunstâncias que devem ser levadas em consideração: o material deve ser coletado por grupos que estão formalmente autorizados para tal, com a coleta sendo feita sob as condições da Convenção de Diversidade Biológica, o processo de descoberta está sendo sucessivamente terceirizado no sentido de firmas especializadas menores e há uma integração crescente como produtores de cosméticos e fitomedicamentos.

The use of products extracted from plants for medicinal purposes can be traced to the beginnings of civilization and up until the end of the nineteenth century natural products were the principal source of medicines. Since then their relative importance has oscillated according to the strategies of large pharmaceutical companies. Now that these strategies are changing, there are new opportunities for countries like Brazil, in which a large proportion of the world's biodiversity is located. There are, however, new circumstances that must be taken into consideration: material must be collected by groups which are formally authorized to do so and under the conditions of the Convention of Biological Diversity, the discovery process is being successively outsourced to smaller specialized firms and there is a growing integration with producers of cosmetics and phytomedicines.

NMR is now frequently the technique of choice for determination of chemical structure in solution. Its uses also span structure in solids and mobility at the molecular level in all phases. The research literature in the subject is vast and ever-increasing. Unfortunately, many articles do not contain sufficient information for experiments to be repeated elsewhere, and there are many variations in the usage of symbols for the same physical quantity. It is the aim of the present recommendations to provide simple check-lists that will enable such problems to be minimised in a way that is consistent with general IUPAC formulation. The area of medical NMR and imaging is not specifically addressed in these recommendations, which are principally aimed at mainstream use of NMR by chemists (of all sub-disciplines) and by many physicists, biologists, material scientists and geologists etc. working with NMR.