Transferability (chemistry)

This page is about transferability in chemistry. Transferability (economics) is a separate topic.

Transferability, in chemistry, is the assumption that a chemical property that is associated with an atom or a functional group in a molecule will have a similar (but not identical) value in a variety of different circumstances. Examples of transferable properties include:

• Electronegativity
• Nucleophilicity
• Chemical shifts in NMR spectroscopy
• Characteristic frequencies in Infrared spectroscopy
• bond length and bond angle
• bond energy

Transferable properties are distinguished from conserved properties, which are assumed to always have the same value whatever the chemical situation, e.g. relative atomic mass.