Since the time first synthetic macrocycles were observed as academic curiosities, great advances have been made. Thanks to the development of controlled polymerization processes, new catalytic systems and characterization techniques during the last decades, well‐defined cyclic polymers are now readily accessible. This further permits the determination of their unique set of properties, mainly due to their lack of chain ends, and their use for industrial applications can now be foreshadowed. This review aims to give an overview on the recent progresses in the field of ring polymers to this day. The current state of the art of the preparation of cyclic polymers, the challenges related to it such as the purification of the samples and the scalability of the synthetic processes, the properties arising from the cyclic topology and the potential use of cyclo‐based polymers for biomedical applications are as many topics covered in this review.

Several families of polymers possessing various end-groups are characterized by ion mobility mass spectrometry (IMMS). A significant contribution of the end-groups to the ion collision cross section (CCS) is observed, although their role is neglected in current fitting models described in literature. Comparing polymers prepared from different synthetic procedures might thus, be misleading with the current theoretical treatments. We show that this issue is alleviated by comparing the CCS of various polymer ions (polyesters and polyethers) as a function of the number of atoms in the macroion instead of the usual representation involving the degree of polymerization. Finally, we extract the atom number density from the spectra which gives us the possibility to evaluate the compaction of polymer ions, and by extension to discern isomeric polymers.