Reactivity descriptors for ceria in catalysis

[Display omitted] •The catalytic performance of ceria has been systematized in terms of chemical descriptors.•Basicity and redox properties contribute simultaneously to several catalytic phenomena.•Experimental rates can be quantitatively expressed by combinations of the chemical descriptors.•These chemical descriptors can be extended to other oxides. Ceria has been very successfully employed in oxidation catalysis, whereas its application in other reactions has been less intensively investigated. The catalytic activity of ceria can be further enhanced by the use of dopants, and it exhibits structure sensitivity for numerous processes. The rich chemistry of cerium oxide is gathered and discussed in the present work, where the nature of each step of the most common reactions performed on it is assessed. Chemically intuitive computational and experimental descriptors, namely acid-base, redox, and structural features, are put forward to correlate the observed trends among the different doped and undoped facets. We have attempted to generate a robust framework that maps the chemically sound descriptors to the experimental fingerprints and theoretically calculated parameters.