DELTA50: A Highly Accurate Database of Experimental 1 H and 13 C NMR Chemical Shifts Applied to DFT Benchmarking.

Density functional theory (DFT) benchmark studies of 1 H and 13 C NMR chemical shifts often yield differing conclusions, likely due to non-optimal test molecules and non-standardized data acquisition. To address this issue, we carefully selected and measured 1 H and 13 C NMR chemical shifts for 50 structurally diverse small organic molecules containing atoms from only the first two rows of the periodic table. Our NMR dataset, DELTA50, was used to calculate linear scaling factors and to evaluate the accuracy of 73 density functionals, 40 basis sets, 3 solvent models, and 3 gauge-referencing schemes. The best performing DFT methodologies for 1 H and 13 C NMR chemical shift predictions were WP04/6-311++G(2d,p) and ωB97X-D/def2-SVP, respectively, when combined with the polarizable continuum solvent model (PCM) and gauge-independent atomic orbital (GIAO) method. Geometries should be optimized at the B3LYP-D3/6-311G(d,p) level including the PCM solvent model for the best accuracy. Predictions of 20 organic compounds and natural products from a separate probe set had root-mean-square deviations (RMSD) of 0.07 to 0.19 for 1 H and 0.5 to 2.9 for 13 C. Maximum deviations were less than 0.5 and 6.5 ppm for 1 H and 13 C, respectively.