It is highly cited because it concerns the very active fields of drug discovery, medicinal chemistry, and combinatorial chemistry.

It describes a methodology towards the discovery of biologically active molecules through a new approach to combinatorial chemistry.

Within the "lock and key" image of Emil Fischer, of fitting a molecular key to a biological lock-target, combinatorial chemistry amounts to the fabrication of many keys and their subsequent screening; whereas dynamic combinatorial chemistry lets the biological target-lock assemble the best-fitting key from fragments of keys undergoing continuous and reversible assembly into keys (self-screening).

It is an outcome of our work on component selection in dynamic self-assembly processes of supramolecular chemistry.