Non-target screening is useful when needing to investigate the presences of all the organic compounds within a sample. In this case, since no information is known about the compounds contained in the sample, no reference standard can be used for comparison, at least initially, overall making non-target screening one of the most challenging approaches. Rather, a full automated scan with mass filtering, peak detection, and other characteristics is used to make initial compound detection. Then elemental composition of detected compounds is deduced using accurate mass of the ions. Database searches can be performed to get a lock on what the most plausible structures are given the elemental composition. Like suspect screening, the initial work performed in non-target screening is largely qualitative, with more quantitative work to potentially follow. Similar to suspect screening, the downside to a fully non-targeted approach is the data-intensive nature of the processes, requiring multivariate statistical models, and the wide variety of data processing workflows used by researchers further complicates evaluation of method performance of those data analysis processes.