2c) The misinterpretation of the Tafel slope Our discussion of the Tafel slope is notably different from the prevailing literature. The common (mis)understanding is that the Tafel slope contains information about the number of occurrences of the rate-determining step and its position within a multistep reaction. In this context, transfer coefficients (𝑡 𝑓 , 𝑡 𝑏 ) are defined from the Tafel slopes (Eq. 18a) and the sum of them is used to determine the number of times the rds occurs (𝑛 𝑟𝑑𝑠 ) for the overall reaction to occur once (Eq. 18b). Secondly, the individual transfer coefficients are used to determine how many electrons are transferred prior to the rds (Eq. 18c). Combining this information will in most cases point towards a step in the reaction sequence as being the rds. This type of analysis has brought the community to regard the Tafel slope as one of the most powerful tools in the kinetic interpretation of multistep reactions in the past five decades.