Nascent hydrogen as a strong reducing and environmentally benign agent can be used as the efficient reductant of graphene oxide. The common method is to dissolve metal in acid graphene oxide (GO) solution to generate nascent hydrogen and reduce graphene oxide. However, hydrophobic metal particles cannot contact well with hydrophilic GO. Lots of nascent hydrogen atoms generated surrounding metal particles would quickly form hydrogen instead of reducing GO, which results in low reduction efficiency. In this work, based on the salting effect of GO, we report a facile approach to synthesize graphene by mild reducing of GO using NH3BH3 as the reducing agent and Co3O4 as the catalyst at room temperature. This method exhibited higher nascent hydrogen reduction efficiency and higher C/O atomic ratio of reduced graphene oxide than using Fe, Zn, and Al among others. Also the reaction is conducted under mild conditions (room temperature), resulting in fewer defects. Crown Copyright (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.