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After decades of developing strategies to minimize the corrosion of metallic biomaterials, there is now an increasing interest to use corrodible metals in a number of medical device applications. The term “biodegradable metal” (BM) has been used worldwide to describe these new kinds of degradable metallic biomaterials for medical applications and there were many new findings reported over the last decade. In this paper, the definition of BM and its classification are given for the first time, along with the summary of the degradation mechanisms of BMs and its environmental influencing factors, which includes the degeneration of mechanical integrity and the metabolism of the degradation products. The recently-developed representative Mg-based BMs (pure Mg, Mg–Ca alloy, Mg–Zn alloy, etc.), Fe-based BMs (pure Fe, Fe–Mn-based alloys, etc.) and other BMs (pure W, pure Zn and its alloys, Ca-based and Sr …