“…In recent years, a more attractive technique, catalytic pyrolysis of biomass toward specific compounds through selective control of biomass pyrolysis process (known as selective pyrolysis) has gained extensive attentions, as it offers a promising way to facilitate the application of pyrolytic products (Theodore and Juan, 2013 ; Liu et al, 2014a ; Shen et al, 2015 ; Zhang et al, 2017 ). Such catalytic/selective pyrolysis can be achieved via suitable biomass materials or proper catalysts under specific pyrolysis conditions, so as to obtain different valuable compounds, such as levoglucosenone (Lu et al, 2014 ; Zhang et al, 2015d ; Ye et al, 2017 ), furfural (Lu et al, 2011 ; Zhang et al, 2014 ), 1-hydroxy-3,6-dioxabicyclo[3.2.1]octan-2-one (Fabbri et al, 2007 ; Zhang et al, 2015a ), aromatic hydrocarbons (Vichaphund et al, 2015 ), 4-vinyl phenol (Qu et al, 2013 ), 4-ethyl phenol (Zhang et al, 2015c ; Lu et al, 2016 ), 4-ethyl guaiacol (Lu et al, 2017 ), nicotyrine (Ye et al, 2016 ) and so on.…”