Aromaticity is one of the core concepts of (bio)organic chemistry and a modern hallmark of this emergent property is electron delocalization in aromatic rings. The Nucleus-Independent Chemical Shift (NICS) attempts to quantify this delocalization by looking at the magnetic shielding caused by ring currents. Despite mounting evidence that the NICS leads to anomalous aromaticity scores, the NICS is currently used indiscriminately to guide many aspects of modern chemical research.

This project aims to show that the NICS is unable to adequately capture the aromatic character of a system and to convince the community that much of the chemistry that has been screened solely based on NICS values must be revisited. As the NICS has become entrenched in computational chemistry, reaching such a consensus will be a game changer for the field of molecular modeling in general as it will lead to a multitude of new insights that are currently hidden under the veil of falsely reassuring NICS values.