The Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is a database of over 900,000 organic and metal organic crystal structures. The database entries contain many different element types and the diversity of different element types that can been found in these structures has increased over the decades. Though the CSD you can also see how often different element types are present in structures and when different element types start to become frequently used in research. A simple way to look at the popularity of element types in small molecule crystal structures is to chart when the element first appeared in the CSD and how frequently it is observed in structures in the CSD, as can been seen below.
Periodic table of elements showing the year of first observation of each element in an organic or metal-organic crystalline environment. Years in brackets indicate that the element has been observed experimentally in a structure, but that particular element has no reported 3D atomic coordinates. Colour scale indicates frequency of observation of element within the CSD
