A series of experiments were performed to establish excited states in proton emitters151Lu,109I and113Cs. These experiments used (HI, p2n) reactions to populate the proton emitters and employed the recoil decay tagging technique to identify gamma rays in the corresponding proton‐unbound nucleus. Gamma‐decay sequences were established in these nuclei and their configurations were tentatively assigned based on systematic trends. This paper reviews the three experimental studies and discusses the data in comparison with those of their neighboring nuclei. © 2003 American Institute of Physics