The existence of any real compensation effect has been widely derided in recent years and attributed to the analysis of interdependent factors and chance. Because the physical roots remain to be fully understood, it has been called into question whether compensation is a truly physical phenomenon or a coincidence due to trivial mathematical connections between parameters. The compensation effect has been criticized in other respects, namely for being the result of random experimental and systematic errors producing the appearance of compensation. The principal complaint lodged states that compensation is an artifact of data from a limited temperature range or from a limited range for the free energies.