The study of Apecies Abundance Distribution (SAD) is the key of understanding what determines species diversity. The theoretical exploration of SAD relates to the maintenance and conservation of biodiversity, and more importantly, it is conducive to clarifying complicated relationship among species and the distribution of matter and energy in a community. The research on SAD began in the 1930s, and there are so many kinds of theoretical models of SAD that can fit actual data, such as geometric-series model, log-series model, log-normal model, broken-stick model and so on. However, despite this, these models are often restrictive in their hypotheses and difficult to fit by natural communities. Especially, there is not always a good fit to the community that only has a few species. Thus, Frontier firstly introduced a family of models termed the Zipf-Mandelbrot model. This model is unrestrictive and easily fit by different natural community. Accordingly, this paper reviewed its origin, hypothesis, construction, problems and ecological signification of parameters to promote the research of SAD and the determination of species diversity.