The oxidation of short-chain alkanes with molecular oxygen was chosen as a class of chemical reactions in this study because these are complex reactions producing a wide variety of products. The selective formation of certain desired products requires chemically and structurally sophisticated catalysts. The particular difficulty is to reach a sufficient yield of valuable products such as olefins or unsaturated oxygenates, i.e., to achieve high selectivity of these products at high conversion, while avoiding total oxidation to CO2. Numerous studies in the literature and in our own laboratories have investigated these reactions. However, very diverse reaction conditions have been applied, as shown by the literature survey presented in Table . This makes a direct comparison of the catalysts impossible and potentially systematic trends not apparent. In general, only catalysts that are structurally related are compared systematically for one given reaction. For example, the influence of the chemical composition of phase-pure polycrystalline (Mo,V,Te,Nb) mixed oxides with "M1" crystal structure on the catalytic properties in propane oxidation was systematically investigated. Similarly, different vanadium phosphate phases or vanadium pentoxide and vanadyl pyrophosphate were compared in the oxidation of n-butane. Other studies investigate multiple reactions, but focus on one single material. For instance the oxidation of ethane, propane and n-butane were compared on both M1-structured (Mo,V,Te,Nb) and MoV oxide catalyst systems. In general, however, systematic studies that simultaneously address chemically diverse catalyst materials and oxidation reactions of homologous compounds are uncommon.