Abstract: The thickness, lateral connectivity and boundary position of the thin layer are increasingly becoming the focus of lithologic seismic exploration, but the recent progress on thin layer have less systematic summary. Therefore, four aspects of thin layer research relating to research subject, forward modeling method, time-frequency analysis method, thickness prediction method are summarized. The following conclusions show that spectrum variation regularity of reflected wave is the key to thin layer analysis. A quantitative relationship between the peak frequency or notches frequency and thin layer thickness has already established. Wave equation forward modeling can reflect the dynamic characteristics of seismic wave in the propagation process, so the simulated wave field information is more rich and real. Analytical tools of reflected wave field are from time domain, frequency domain analysis to the time-frequency analysis and temporal characteristics of the reflected wave spectrum are took more attention. Thus wave field characteristics of thin layer are gradually evolved from a simple qualitative analysis to quantitative prediction direction.