Abstract: In recent years, the material flow analysis method has been applied to the study of iron resources.This paper studies the research results from two aspects:the industrial level, the national level and the global level; and the combination of material flow method and other research methods such as system dynamics model and complex network model.We found that the study of iron material flow at the industrial level or in a single country is already mature, and the main innovation in the future is the combination with other analytical methods.The research on iron material flow at the trans-regional or global level is relatively less, the research combined with other analytical methods is not deep enough, and future research can achieve more innovative achievements in this field.Because of the wide range of iron products, it is difficult to identify and statistics the final products in the industry chain, and introduce final products into the whole life cycle research of iron resources is also one of the future breakthrough direction.