ArticleThe journal of physical chemistry letters2024
Hydrogen Bonds Are Never of an "Anti-electrostatic" Nature: A Brief Tour of a Misleading Nomenclature.
Article in The journal of physical chemistry letters, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Structural and Spectroscopic Evidence of Hydrogen Bonded Anionic Wires in Protic Ionic Liquids.Chemphyschem : a European journal of chemical physics and physical chemistry · 2026Article
- Structural Evidence of Interanionic Hydrogen Bonding in Phosphoric Acid Solutions.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Probing Hydrogen-Bonding Preferences and Methyl Internal Rotation in Sotolon and Sotolon-(HInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Crystal structure of 1,10-phenanthrolinium violurate violuric acid penta-hydrate.Acta crystallographica. Section E, Crystallographic communications · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
A large amount of scientific works have contributed through the years to rigorously reflect the different forces leading to the formation of hydrogen bonds, the electrostatic and polarization ones being the most important among them. However, we have witnessed lately with the emergence of a new terminology, anti-electrostatic hydrogen bonds (AEHBs), that seems to contradict this reality. This nomenclature is used in the literature to describe hydrogen bonds between equally charged systems to justify the existence of these species, despite numerous proofs showing that AEHBs are, as any other hydrogen bond between neutral species, mostly due to electrostatic forces. In this Viewpoint, we summarize the state of the art regarding this issue, try to explain why this terminology is very misleading, and strongly recommend avoiding its use based on the hydrogen bond physical grounds.
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