For ZIF-8 at least the choice of initial plateau is easy, since there is no considerable mass loss before linker decomposition and we take the plateau to be at 100 %. The residue lies at 35 % of the initial mass. The equation of Shearer suggests an excess of linker with 2.07 linkers per metal ion. The method of Abánades Lázaro similarly suggests there are 2.06 ligands per Zn 2+ . From our integrated approach we obtained a rather different estimate of 1.97 ligands per node. Looking at this difference in more detail, we calculated that our method does account only for 97 % of the total mass. This signals the presence of something other than Zn 2+ or MeIm in this ZIF-8 sample. There are however no unexplained signals in the NMR spectrum and the TGA data shows no mass loss at low temperature that could be associated with water.