“sample” vs “specimen” in a scientific document on condensed matter physics

Question

I am searching for an appropriate headline in scientific document. The chapter is named "Investigated Specimen" at the moment. In the chapter I describe crystals that I have investigated.

I feel that "Investigated Specimen" is not clear or appropriately descriptive. Would "Samples Used in the Experiments" be a common title or is there perhaps a better variant that is used in scientific papers?

Answer 1

Experimental Samples is a possibility. Analyzed Samples is another. I don't like specimen, even though it's a perfectly reasonable synonym, because it makes me think of urine specimen and stool specimen (I'm a biomedical editor), and I think that sample is more general in current scientific usage: many biomed, business management, and other technical writers use sample size to refer to the number of specimens in their study populations, whether they be rats, humans, tissue samples, data points, etc.

Answer 2

I used the linux command find -name "*.pdf" -exec pdftotext '{}' - \; |egrep --colour sample | wc -l to make a statistic on the usage of specimen and sample in publications of nature, and physic journals.

Files scanned: 443

specimen occured 57 times

sample occured 1696 times

Hence I am convinced to use sample