Synthesis: the first step in chemistry!

Abstract

Every chemist has at some time synthesized a compound, because synthesizing is the beginning of all subsequent studies. It does not maer if the applications include medicine, engineering, food, energy, or it is just the interest in creating new mole- cules. Most discoveries in chemistry include the of new materials and every day new compounds are created or found, and innovative preparation routes are test- ed. According to the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), in 1993 only 38.9% of the records reported the presence of transition metal elements, with 20,439 structures. 17 year later that 0gure increased to 48.0%, with 120,638 new structures, and recent- ly, in 2012, a new record was reached, with 319,188 structures, representing 53.5% of the total in the CSD (1). For that reason it is common, even in many prestigious inorganic chemistry journals, to 0nd that in a large number of articles there is a sec- tion on and spectroscopic and/or structural characterization. 7e word synthesis appears in all papers and is one of the most common words in the titles of articles. In the last decades inorganic has evolved, reaching a great variety of tech- niques as published in the book Modern Inorganic Synthetic Chemistry , with more than 20 chapters on di<erent aspects of such diverse areas as: high and low tempera- ture synthesis, hydrothermal and solvothermal synthesis, coordination polymers, cluster compounds, host-guest materials, ceramics, nanomaterials, among other chapters devoted exclusively to modern inorganic (2). But not only the traditional and preparation of inorganic compound is growing every day. Over the last ten years there has been an increasing number of new highly ordered structures called nanoparticles, expanding even more the family of inorganic materials with a great impact all the way from medicine to energy. Consequently, this promising area of sci- ence shows more than 100 journals associ- ated with new nanomaterials in the last 20