Abstract: | Piroxicam is a drug with analgesic and anti‐inflammatory properties. It is present in numerous pharmaceutical preparations. Injectable forms usually contain benzyl alcohol as an excipient, which is used as a blocking anesthetic (4%) and an antiseptic (4–10%). In this work, spectrophotometric methodology was used in order to determine benzyl alcohol in piroxicam injectable formulations by applying the fourth derivative method adopting the zero‐crossing technique. The results obtained show that the method has significant advantages over other reported methods and is appropriate for routine pharmaceutical analysis. The method showed excellent linearity in the range of 2–100 μg mL?1 with limit of detection (S/N = 3) 0.07 μg mL?1 (6.47 × 10?7 M). The proposed method could be applied successfully for the determination of benzyl alcohol in injectable formulations with average % recovery of 100 ± 0.61. |