Aromaticity of metallabenzenes and related compounds

The concept of aromaticity was initially introduced in chemistry to account for the stability, reactivity, molecular structures, and other properties of many unsaturated organic compounds. Despite that, it has been extended to other species with mobile electrons including saturated systems, transition structures, and even inorganic molecules. In this review, we focus on the aromaticity of a particular family of organometallic compounds known as metallabenzenes, which are characterized by the formal replacement of a CH group in benzene by an isolobal transition metal fragment. In addition, aromaticity of related compounds such as heterometallabenzenes is considered as well. To this end, we shall describe herein the insight gained by the available experimental data as well as by the application of the state-of-the-art computational methods developed as descriptors for aromaticity together with a critical evaluation of their performance to quantitatively estimate the strength of aromaticity of these systems.