“…In the past decade, many specific reviews have been written with focuses ranging on various topics, addressing for example synthesis challenges (Lu and Chen 2012), spectroscopy and microscopy characterisation tools (Mino et al 2013, Wang and Palmer 2015a, Marks and Peng 2016, Gao et al 2017, Londono-Calderon et al 2017, Bootharaju et al 2018 with and a more critical approach presented by Billinge and Levin (2007); numerical methods for the prediction of energetically favourable mono and bimetallic clusters, sometimes also including thermodynamical considerations (Baletto and Ferrando 2005, Ferrando et al 2008, Barnard 2010, Heiles and Johnston 2013, Ferrando 2015, Heard and Johnston 2017, Ferrando 2018, Mejía-Rosales 2018, Wales 2018. Others focus on properties and applications of metallic nanoparticles (Viñes et al 2014, Tyo and Vajda 2015, Chakraborty and Pradeep 2017, Zhai and Alexandrova 2017, Jiang et al 2018, Kang et al 2018, Liu and Corma 2018, even proposing routes towards a new nanoparticle chemistry (Luo and Castleman 2014, Jena and Sun 2018, Wang et al 2018.…”