Structural families in nitride chemistry

Recent progress in the area of nitride chemistry has been rapid and increasingly diverse. Advances in ternary transition metal nitride research have been significant in the last several years to the point where the chemist can begin to correlate these compounds in terms of certain favoured structure types. It is a facet of the often intermediate bonding behaviour in these solids that the structure types so far exhibited are an intriguing mix of covalent (carbide-like), ionic (oxide-like) and unique motifs. While new motifs continue to be discovered with astonishing regularity, an attempt is made to summarise and classify just some of the major emerging ternary nitride structural families.