Do Double-Hybrid Exchange–Correlation Functionals Provide Accurate Chemical Shifts? A Benchmark Assessment for Proton NMR

A benchmark density functional theory (DFT) study of 1H NMR chemical shifts for data sets comprising 200 chemical shifts, including complex natural products, has been carried out to assess the performance of DFT methods. Two new benchmark data sets, NMRH33 and NMRH148, have been established. The meta-GGA revTPSS performs remarkably well against the NMRH33 benchmark set (mean absolute deviation (MAD), 0.10 ppm; maximum deviation (max), 0.26 ppm) with the smallest MAD of all evaluated functionals. The best-performing double-hybrid density functional (DHDF), revDSD-BLYP (MAD, 0.16 ppm; max, 0.35 ppm), performs similarly to hybrid-GGA methods (e.g., mPW1PW91/6-311G(d) (MAD, 0.15 ppm; max, 0.36 ppm)), but at a considerably higher computational cost. The results indicate that currently available double-hybrid DFT methods offer no benefit over GGA (including hybrid and meta) functionals in the calculation of 1H NMR chemical shifts.