The study of self-healing materials was inspired by the self-cured biological systems

which can repair themselves and maintain their mechanical properties at certain degree after being wounded. For the polymeric materials

homolytic or heterolytic bond cleavage happen in macromolecular chains when damages occurred

leading to microcracks which is hard to detect. The appearance of microcracks will generally result in the failure of the polymeric materials. Thus

quickly healing the microcracks are important for the application of polymeric materials in various engineering fields.. In this review

we summarized the progresses of extrinsic and the intrinsic self-healing polymeric materials in recent 5 years

and the future development is prospected.