Organometallic coordination polymers (metallopolymers) combining the advantages of both metals and polymers attracted increasing interests recently due to their widely potential applications in engineering sectors such as clean energy, smart materials, high-performanced devices and so on. The physical properties and performance of this kind of materials are strongly dependent on their chain structures, and so determined by synthesis approaches adopted. The main progresses made in the field of metallopolymer synthesis during the last decade are reviewed. This paper is organized in terms of sequence of the formation of polymer chains and the incorporation of metal centers, including synthesis of polymer chains first and subsequent incorporation of metal complexes into the polymers, synthesis of metal-containing monomers followed by polymerization of the reactable monomers, and one-pot synthesis of metallopolymers, saying the formation of polymer and the incorporation of metal centers are fulfilled simultaneously. Synthesis approaches to metallopolymers with various topological structures such as lineal, comb (or grafting), star, dendronized and so on in each catalogue are exemplified in details. The advantages and disadvantages of each synthesis approach are discussed. We put emphasis on the correlation among synthesis approaches, topological structure and their performances of metallopolymers. Finally, the further work needed to do and development trends in the field of metallopolymer synthesis are proposed. Contents 1 Introduction 2 Incorporation methods of metal centers into polymers 3 Synthesis of metallopolymer 3.1 Synthesis of polymer and subsequent incorpora-tion of metal complexes 3.2 Synthesis of metal-containing monomers followed by polymerization 3.3 One-pot synthesis of metallopolymers 4 Conclusions and outlook