“…attention since they can be preserved and enriched in long and complicated geological processes, with relevant geological information carried and rendered. As revealed by previous studies, diamondoids are applicable to evaluating the thermal maturity of crude oil (Zhao et al, 1995;Chen et al, 1996;Zheng et al, 1998;Li et al, 2000;Zhang et al, 2005;Ma et al, 2017;Jiang et al, 2019Jiang et al, , 2021Jiang et al, , 2022Akinlua et al, 2020;Goodwin et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2022b), judging the migration direction and charging period of oil and gas (Duan et al, 2007;Huang et al, 2022aHuang et al, , 2022b, assessing the cracking degree of crude oil (Dahl et al, 1999;Chai et al, 2022;Peng et al, 2022), identifying lithofacies (Schulz et al, 2001;Chai et al, 2020), evaluating the secondary alteration of oil reservoirs (Jiang et al, 2020), researching oil-source correlation (Forkner et al, 2021), assessing residual of migration fractionation (Zhu et al, 2021), exploring the thermochemical sulfate reduction reaction (Wei et al, 2011), and identifying in the sources of oil (Stout and Douglas, 2004;Wang et al, 2006;Spaak et al, 2020), especially at the over-mature stage in case of relative equilibrium reached among other biomarkers, or their failure resulting from low content.…”