Recent years (2000-2003) have witnessed an upsurge in the application of combinatorial and high-throughput experimental methods to polymers. This review highlights the most recent developments in high-throughput polymer science, in order to put into perspective the articles selected for this special section of The Journal of Materials Science. This article begins by defining the unique challenges in polymer (and materials) high-throughput screening (HTS), with respect to other applications of combinatorial and high-throughput methods in drug discovery and catalyst development. Advances in the preparation of HTS libraries are then discussed, with a distinction made between libraries for synthetic investigation and libraries for formulation and characterization. Then, the recent applications of HTS to polymer analytical methods (for chemical characterization of synthetic libraries) and physical characterization methods (for formulation libraries) are presented. (C) 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.