The exponential growth in research featuring metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) over the last 20 years has been markedly concentrated in China, according to a new analysis based on data in the American Chemical Society’s CAS Content Collection, formerly known as the Chemical Abstracts Service. Jeremy Krogman, lead scientist for materials at CAS, presented the data during a session of the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in Atlanta, Georgia on 25 March.
There were fewer than 200 publications on MOFs in 2005 and in 2025 that figure had grown to more than 20,000. Through a systematic analysis of journal articles, patent filings and substance registrations, Krogman and his team traced the progression of proposed MOF applications from initial gas storage concepts to diverse applications spanning carbon capture, catalysis, energy storage, water harvesting, drug delivery and biosensing.
One surprise was the global distribution of MOF publications – China contributed 59% of them publishing nearly 81,000 papers in this field. The US is in second place with 8200 and the UK is towards the bottom with 1800.
The analysis reveals that the most common proposed applications for MOFs are adsorption, which accounted for 41,000 of the publications and includes gas capture and separation and wastewater treatment, as well as carbon sequestration. MOFs have also been proposed as catalysts and this accounted for 31,000 publications.
Krogman noted that approximately 19% of these MOF publications are patents, and he said Chinese universities represent 48 of the top 50 global organisations that are patenting MOFs.
However, data from the World Intellectual Property Organization – the United Nations agency that is the global forum for intellectual property services – indicates that a variety of organisations from a wide range of countries are patenting MOFs. These include petrochemical companies and large chemical companies that are looking at MOFs for carbon capture and other companies interested in energy storage and battery technologies.
Regarding China’s dominance in MOFs, several panellists agreed that this is a phenomenon seen across-the-board. In the case of materials science and energy, they said, China is leading the way when it comes to the number of scientific publications.
Omar Yaghi from the University of California, Berkeley, who is often credited with founding the field of reticular chemistry and shared last year’s Nobel prize in chemistry for his work developing MOFs, said: ‘When China is strong scientifically, we like the US to also be strong scientifically, then these two giant economies are focusing on science and funding science. And the closer they are, the better the world will be.’
Yaghi also remarked that the boundaries inside chemistry are blurred. He added that reticular chemists are navigating and practicing inorganic, organic, physical, analytical and materials chemistry. ‘Reticular chemistry is also blending with other fields in a meaningful way,’ he continued, noting that reticular chemists today deal with physics, biology, mechanical engineering and computer science, among other disciplines.
‘We are looking at a new branch of chemistry, that in biology you would say is a different “species”,’ he continued. ‘Here, you have an area of research that is asking new questions, and at best it will be evolving in parallel with molecular chemistry.’ Yaghi said that judging by the number of people around the world who are stepping into MOF research it is clearly a very exciting field.
During a keynote lecture that Yaghi delivered immediately after the MOF session to mark the ACS’s 150th anniversary, he advised the new generation of scientists and engineers that there has never been a better time to do chemistry and science. ‘The tools available – the facilities, the resources – are immense,’ Yaghi said. ‘Instead of theorising about why the experiment shouldn’t be done, it’s a lot easier to just do the experiment; when you do an experiment, you open the door to discover and that discovery may change the world.’
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