Surface roughness plays an important role in various fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology. However, the present practices in roughness measurements, typically based on some Atomic Force Microscopy measurements for nanometric roughness or optical or mechanical profilometry for larger scale roughness significantly bias the results. Such biased values are present in nearly all the papers dealing with surface parameters, in the areas of nanotechnology, thin films or material science. Surface roughness, most typically root mean square value of irregularities Sq is often used parameter that is used to control the technologies or to link the surface properties with other material functionality. The error in estimated values depends on the ratio between scan size and roughness correlation length and on the way how the data are processed and can easily be larger than 10% without us noting anything suspicious. Here we present a survey of how large is the problem, detailed analysis of its nature and suggest methods to predict the error in roughness measurements and possibly to correct them. We also present a guidance for choosing suitable scan area during the measurement.

表面粗糙度在纳米科学和纳米技术的各个领域中起着重要作用。然而，目前粗糙度测量的实践，通常基于一些用于纳米粗糙度的原子力显微镜测量或用于更大规模粗糙度的光学或机械轮廓测量，显着地偏向于结果。在纳米技术、薄膜或材料科学领域，几乎所有处理表面参数的论文都存在这种偏差值。表面粗糙度，最典型的不规则性均方根值 Sq 是常用的参数，用于控制技术或将表面特性与其他材料功能联系起来。估计值的误差取决于扫描大小和粗糙度相关长度之间的比率以及数据处理方式，并且很容易大于 10%，而我们不会注意到任何可疑之处。在这里，我们对问题的严重程度进行了调查，对其性质进行了详细分析，并提出了预测粗糙度测量误差并可能对其进行纠正的方法。我们还提供了在测量过程中选择合适扫描区域的指南。