The effect of peak distribution in a CID spectrum on the informing power of six mass spectrometry based approaches, QIT, TOF, FT-ICRMS, QIT coupled with ion/ion reaction, TOF coupled with ion/ion reaction and FT-ICRMS coupled with ion/ion reaction, in the context of the CID simulation. A mixture of 300 product ions was employed in the simulation. Data are averaged from 20 simulations and the error bar is the standard deviation of the repeated simulation results.