text: Mass spectrometry (MS) is helpful for the determination of the molecular weight of the polymer, structure of the polymer, etc. Although chemists utilize many kinds of MS, the two that are used most typically are  matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization/time of flight (MALDI-TOF) and  electrospray ionization-mass spectroscopy (ESI-MS). One of the biggest disadvantages of this technique is that much like NMR spectroscopy the polymers have to be soluble in some organic solvent. An advantage of using MALDI is that it provides the simpler data to interpret for end group identification compared with ESI, but a disadvantage is that the ionization can be rather hard and as a result some end groups do not remain intact for analysis. Because of the harsh ionization in MALDI, one of the biggest advantages of using ESI is for its "softer" ionization methods. The disadvantage of using ESI is that the data obtained can be very complex due to the mechanism of the ionization and thus can be difficult to interpret.