**10. Published papers and patents evolution**

An indication of the initiation and fast growth of the field is given by bibliographic and patents evolution. As can be observed, the literature related to conducting polymers actuators starts from 1990 (Fig. 4.a) reaching a maximum in 2006 with 45 papers, an excellent value for such a specific topic. After that, around 30 papers have been published every year. Fig. 4.b shows exponential evolution of citations with a value of almost 2000 in 2010. A similar evolution is observed in Fig. 4.c for patents, reaching a maximum in 2009 with 180 patents.

**Figure 4.** Evolution of a) published papers, b) citations and c) patents for "conducting polymer & actuator", from the ISI web of Knowledge® and Scopus®.
