  Reactions are an important tool to study nuclear structure and for extracting
reactions relevant for astrophysics. In this paper we focus on deuteron induced
reactions which can provide information on neutron shell evolution as well as
neutron capture cross sections. We review recent work on the systematic
comparison of the continuum discretized coupled channel method, the adiabatic
wave approximation and the Faddeev momentum-space approach. We also explore
other aspects of the reaction mechanism and discuss in detail difficulties
encountered in the calculations.
