“…Based on these newly gained experimental (control experiments see ESI, Supplementary Scheme S1 , SupplementaryFigure S1, S2 and computational calculation) and computational results as well as previous literature reports ( Kita et al, 1997 ; Woon et al, 2006 ; Ito et al, 2019 ; Xing et al, 2019a ; An et al, 2020 ), a possible mechanistic pathway for the formation of the C4 thiocyanated isocumarins was proposed ( Scheme 4 ). Differing from the previous mechanism ( Kita et al, 1997 ), we tentatively proposed that intermediate A , an ionic form of PhICl 2 , reacted with thiocyanate directly to give the reactive thiocyanogen chloride, which could be supported by the observation of peak of 109.1 ppm in its 13 C NMR analysis ( Tao et al, 2021 ).…”