By 2013 the field had outgrown anyone's ability to follow it paper by paper: on the order of twenty thousand framework structures had been reported within a decade. This Science review is the census that made the sprawl legible, organizing MOFs by their secondary building units and topologies, tabulating the porosity records, and mapping applications, gas storage, separations, catalysis, sensing, proton conduction, biomedicine, onto the structural features each demands.
Its pedagogical machinery explains the citation count, comfortably in the tens of thousands. The SBU-to-net illustrations amount to a visual grammar of the field; the running comparisons, MOF versus zeolite, versus carbon, versus each other, give newcomers calibrated expectations; and the section on post-synthetic modification and multivariate frameworks flags where the frontier stood with accuracy that has aged well.
A review is also a viewpoint, and this one carries its authors' accent. Reticular design and rigid carboxylate frameworks occupy the center; the flexible, soft-porous tradition of the Kyoto school receives comparatively brief treatment, and commercial or process-engineering realities, cost, shaping, cycling, barely appear. A 2013 reader would leave knowing what MOFs can do and underinformed about what deploying one costs.
Those are footnotes to its usefulness. If a colleague from another field asks for one paper that explains what MOFs are, this remains the correct answer, supplemented, this reviewer suggests, by Kitagawa's 2004 review for stereo sound.