Impact of Design of Experiments in the optimisation of catalytic reactions in academia

Design of Experiments (DoE) is extensively and routinely used in industry; however, in the last decades, it has been gaining increasing interest in organic synthesis in academia. The use of Chemometrics is an attractive strategy to find the real optimum in chemical reactions, especially when affected by several variables. DoE has been applied in a growing number of synthetic transformations over the years, where it can undoubtedly help in the process optimisation, saving costs and time. This review concisely discusses the chemometric basis of Design of Experiments and highlights several examples in which DoE has been applied in organic synthesis. Table of contents 1 Introduction 2 Chemometric basis of DoE 3 DoE applied in catalysis: examples 4 Conclusions