Abstract Clotrimazole is an antifungal agent widely used in pharmaceutical formulations. Quality control of pharmaceutical products requires accurate, rapid, and selective analytical procedures. In this work, a derivative spectrophotometric method for clotrimazole determination using the first derivative of the absorption spectra was developed. The analytical curve was linear at concentrations between 1.18 × 10-4 and 5.90 × 10-4 mol L-1. The limit of detection and the limit of quantification were 2.0 × 10-5 mol L-1 (3 × sy/x) and 6.4 × 10-5 mol L-1 (10 × sy/x), respectively. The proposed clotrimazole determination method does not include a liquid extraction step and requires simple sample preparation. Relative standard deviations values lower than 1.5% were obtained for standard clotrimazole solutions. The derivative spectrophotometric method showed no matrix interference in the analysis of the studied commercial cream samples, and results in acceptable recovery values (95–105%).
Keywords derivative spectrophotometry; pharmaceutical analysis; pharmaceutical product; validation.