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Organic Reactions® provides a compilation of an authoritative summary of a preparatively useful organic reaction from the primary literature. Practitioners interested in executing such a reaction (or simply learning about the features, advantages, and limitations of this process) thus have a valuable resource to guide their experimentation. Abstracting services, such Chemical Abstracts and Beilstein, allow for the practitioner to locate all of the literature on the subject, but without providing insight into the value of any particular reference.

Organic Reactions® chapters constitute a distillation of this avalanche of information into the knowledge needed to correctly implement a reaction and are much more than a surfeit of primary references. This capacity, namely to provide focused, scholarly, and comprehensive overviews of a given transformation, that Organic Reactions takes on even greater significance for the practice of chemical experimentation in the 21st century. The suitability of a given reaction for an unknown application is best judged from the informed vantage point provided by precedent and guidelines offered by a knowledgeable author as provide in Organic Reactions.

Complete list of published chapters may be found at: https://OrganicReactions.org/published-chapters/.

Visit the Organic Reactions® web page for more information.

Organic Reactions® regularly financially supports Organic Division programs and they cosponsor the Roger Adams Award which recognizes and encourage outstanding contributions to research in organic chemistry defined in its broadest sense. The award is presented biennially in odd-numbered years at the National Organic Chemistry Symposium (NOS). A video of the 2023 Award presentation including some of the history of Organic Reactions is available here.

Organic Reactions – Officers

Dr. P. Andrew Evans, Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Steven Weinreb, Executive Editor
Dr. Barry Snider, Secretary

Latest from Organic Reactions


Hydrozirconation of Alkynes

Since the first preparation of organozirconocenes from alkenes and alkynes in 1972, hydrozirconation has become one of the most commonly used stoichiometric methods to convert readily available starting materials into [...]

Transition-Metal-Catalyzed Alkyl-Alkyl Cross-Coupling Reactions

The cross-coupling reaction of alkyl halides with alkyl metal reagents is a straightforward synthetic method to construct saturated carbon frameworks. Although the development of alkyl–alkyl cross-coupling reactions has lagged behind [...]

The classic Ugi reaction is a four-component coupling process that involves a carboxylic acid, a carbonyl compound, an amine, and an isocyanide. All reaction components are in a dynamic equilibrium [...]

The classic Ugi reaction is a four-component coupling process involving a carboxylic acid, a carbonyl compound, an amine, and an isocyanide, resulting in an N-acylamino acid amide product. Modified Ugi reactions [...]

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of reductive cyclizations of 2-nitro- and β-nitrostyrenes, 2-nitrobiphenyls, and 1-nitro-1,3-dienes to furnish indoles, carbazoles, and pyrroles, respectively, as well as heteroatom analogs thereof. Two [...]

The ring-opening reactions of epoxides with titanium(III) reagents such as Cp 2 TiCl are critically reviewed, including the scope, limitations, and mechanism of these synthetically useful transformations. The initial reaction proceeds by [...]

Epoxide opening is a powerful strategy for accessing β-functionalized alcohols from epoxides, which are readily available from alkenes. This review focuses on the desymmetrization of meso or centrosymmetric (prochiral) epoxides. The enantioselective [...]

Extrusion reactions may be defined as chemical reactions in which an atom or small molecular fragment Y connected to two other atoms W and Z is lost from a molecule, [...]

This chapter describes the use of allyl- and vinylstannane reagents for a variety of radical-based transformations. The processes discussed include direct addition of radicals to allyl- and vinylstannanes, multicomponent or [...]