Coordination polymers based conductive materials: ionic conductivity vs electronic conductivity

Coordination polymers (CPs) appear as an emerging crystalline material, and researchers have promoted their potential applications in various fields, owing to easily designed and tailable structures, guest-accessible cavities and functional tunability. In this review, we mainly focus on describing recent achievements of CPs/CPs based composites for ionic/electrical conductivity and provide their future perspectives. The designable and tailorable structures of CPs provide great opportunities to systemically tune their ionic/electrical conductivities, and various strategies have been employed to improve their conductivity. Meanwhile, the relationship between the structure and conductivity may offer some guidances for design and syntheses of new conductive materials with high conductivity. We propose major fundamental issues to be addressed in materials design and application perspectives. By elaborating the advantages and challenges of coordination polymers in ionic/electrical conductivity, some useful advices are provided in this review to shed some light on the coming development.