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In this study, the X-ray constrained wavefunction approach is carefully investigated in order to assess its ability to capture the effect of electron correlation on electron density. Electron distributions obtained from highly correlated molecular wavefunctions are the benchmarks and their Fourier transforms are used to simulate X-ray intensities for the constrained wavefunction calculations., The X-ray constrained wavefunction (XC-WF) method proposed by Jayatilaka [Jayatilaka & Grimwood (2001) ▸, Acta Cryst. A57, 76–86] has attracted much attention because it represents a possible third way of theoretically studying the electronic structure of atoms and molecules, combining features of the more popular wavefunction- and DFT-based approaches. In its original formulation, the XC-WF technique extracts statistically plausible wavefunctions from experimental X-ray diffraction data of molecular crystals. A weight is used to constrain the pure Hartree–Fock solution to the observed X-ray structure factors. Despite the wavefunction being a single Slater determinant, it is generally assumed that its flexibility could guarantee the capture, better than any other experimental model, of electron correlation effects, absent in the Hartree–Fock Hamiltonian but present in the structure factors measured experimentally. However, although the approach has been known for long time, careful testing of this fundamental hypothesis is still missing. Since a formal demonstration is impossible, the validation can only be done heuristically and, to accomplish this task, X-ray constrained Hartree–Fock calculations have been performed using structure factor amplitudes computed at a very high correlation level (coupled cluster) for selected molecules in isolation, in order to avoid the perturbations due to intermolecular interactions. The results show that a single-determinant XC-WF is able to capture the electron correlation effects only partially. The largest amount of electron correlation is extracted when: (i) a large external weight is used (much larger than what has normally been used in XC-WF calculations using experimental data); and (ii) the high-order reflections, which carry less information on the electron correlation, are down-weighted (or even excluded), otherwise they would bias the fitting towards the unconstrained Hartree–Fock wavefunction.