Synthesis: the first step in chemistry!

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 synthesis 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 synthesis 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 synthesis 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