This work is focused on the study of heat and mass transfer by mixed convection over a vertical slender cylinder in the presence of chemical reaction and thermal‐diffusion and diffusion‐thermo effects. The resulting equations have the property whereby they reduce to various special cases previously considered in the literature. An adequate implicit, tri‐diagonal finite‐difference scheme is employed for the numerical solution of the obtained equations. Various comparisons with previously published work are performed and the results are found to be in excellent agreement. Representative results for the local skin‐friction coefficient, local Nusselt number, and the local Sherwood number illustrating the influence of the surface transverse curvature parameter, Richardson number, concentration to thermal buoyancy ratio, Schmidt number, chemical reaction, and the Dufour and Soret numbers are presented and discussed. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res, 42(7): 618–629, 2013; Published online in Wiley Online Library (http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/htj). DOI 10.1002/htj.21045