In the past decades, the application of eco-friendly carbonaceous materials as catalysts for organic reactions has gained intensive attention. For example, materials like carbon dots [
1,
2], graphitic carbon nitride (g-C
3N
4) [
3-
6], have emerged as potent heterogeneous catalysts for various organic transformations. As shown in
Scheme 1, graphene oxide (GO) possesses unique structures, various surface functional groups, and excellent properties, such as a large surface area in single or few layers, acidic properties due to carboxyl groups on the edges, oxidative properties assisted by hydroxyl or epoxy on the basal plane [
7,
8], conduction band (CB) energy (
ECB = 0.51 eV
vs. NHE) and valence band (VB) energy (
EVB = 3.28–3.98 eV
vs. NHE) [
9]. Those properties make GO or modified GO as promising materials in biology, energy, organic synthesis, and other fields, like nanocarriers for efficiently impairing tumor mitochondria, heterogeneous carbocatalyst for biomass conversion by controllable depolymerization of lignin [
10-
13]. Meanwhile, since the significant work achieved by Bielawski in 2010 [
14], considerable attention has been paid to organic reactions catalyzed by GO [
15-
23]. Although multifarious outstanding reviews [
24-
29] about the synthesis and characterization of GO and modified GO were published, the overview of native GO-catalyzed organic reactions has not been well documented [
30-
32]. Recently, Bandini
et al. summarized the mechanist aspects of organic transformations catalyzed by GO [
33]. Considering the importance of GO catalysis, we herein present a minireview aiming to emphasize its significance and widespread applications of GO in organic synthesis over the past decade (mainly from 2011 to 2020). This review includes the application of native graphene oxide for (ⅰ) oxidative reactions, including oxydehydrogenation and oxidative coupling reactions, (ⅱ) functional group transformations, (ⅲ) Friedel-Crafts reactions, (ⅳ) condensation reactions, and so on.