Abstract: 2-Phenyl benzothiophene is an important compound and has been widely used in the synthesis of medicines, pesticides and functional materials, and so on. Much research concern has been made on its synthesis. Sereval synthetic routes have been developed for the synthesis of 2-phenyl benzothiophene over the past decades. In this short review, we briefly summarized the recent progress in this field using benzo[b]thiophene, 2-benzo[b]thiophene boronic acid and substituted benzene as substrates and made some comments on the future perspectives of the synthetic methodology.

Key words: phenyl benzothiophene, synthesis, review, evaluation