Applications of the Cambridge Structural Database to molecular inorganic chemistry

Applications of the data in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) to knowledge acquisition and fundamental research in molecular inorganic chemistry are reviewed. Various classes of application are identified, including the derivation of typical molecular dimensions and their variability and transferability, the derivation and testing of theories of molecular structure and bonding, the identification of reaction paths and related conformational analyses based on the structure correlation hypothesis, and the identification of common and presumably energetically favourable intermolecular interactions. In many of these areas, the availability of plentiful structural data from the CSD is set against the emergence of high-quality computational data on the geometry and energy of inorganic complexes.