Scale factor in powder diffraction

In this paper, a simple method of obtaining the scale factor that transforms powder intensities from arbitrary units into electron units is proposed. This method, which is suitable for diffraction data collected from polycrystalline single-phase specimens, without fluorescence and preferred-orientation effects, obtains the scale factor analyzing the global scattered intensity in the reciprocal space without the necessity for the peak-background separation. Once the scale factor is found, it is possible to estimate the overall thermal parameter and to trace a physically based background line which is useful in extracting accurate structure factors.