Cherts are widely distributed on the surface of the earth and are a special type of sedimentary rocks. On one hand, they retain abundant and reliable information of palaeogeography, palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironments because of their high hardness and strong resistance to weathering; on the other hand, they are closely related to organism evolution an formation of some sedimentary ore deposits. Those two aspects make it become one of the hot research projects in the cycle of sedimentology with very important theoretical and practical significance. On the basis of the imformation from a wide variety of retrieval tool books and published literatures, the author has summarized the history of chert research abroad and discussed its present state of art and future developing trends. By comparison of chert research in China, several suggestions have been made to change the under developed state in this field.