The concept of sustainable community combines the principles of architecture, ecology and sociology, reflects the harmonious relationship between human and nature, and follows the tenets of sustainable development. Constructing sustainable communities needs the cooperation of different stakeholders of planner, real estate developer, governor, inhabitant, and manager of department of property. Sustainable community indicators are normally under an indicators framework, applying quantitative or qualitative indicators to assess the sustainable development level of communities. First, concepts, contents and research history of sustainable communities were summarized, and current evaluating indicator systems such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM), Comprehensive Assessment System for Building Environment Efficiency (CASBEE), China Evaluating Standard for Green Buildings (ESGB), China Evaluating Indicators & Evaluating Standards for Green Communities (EIASGC) and other relative literatures of sustainable community indicators were reviewed. The main findings were: (1) different evaluating systems of sustainable communities focused on different stakeholders, such as planner, real estate developer, governor, inhabitants, and manager of department of property; (2) methods such as theory analysis, frequency statistics, experts consultation and public participation could be applied in the processes of establishment indicator framework and selection of indicators; (3) sixty-nine indicators were found from twenty relative literatures, and the cited frequency of each indicator was counted; among these sixty-nine indicators, twelve indicators cited frequency were more than 50%, while five indicators cited frequency were less than 5%; (4) weights, standard values and results express methods were important parts of evaluating indicator systems, both average weight and weight determined by method of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) were applied in current evaluating systems. CASBEE proposed another useful way of expression the evaluating results; the ratio of building quality (Q) and environmental load reduction (LR) were adopted to express the concept of efficiency. The review also found some deficiencies in the current researches. Firstly, most of the researches focused on the community themselves and neglected the materials and energy interaction between the community and the natural environment. Secondly, dynamic developing progress of constructing sustainable communities was not paid enough attention in reviewed literatures, which was important for evaluating the built urban communities. Thirdly, designing process of indicator system lacks of public participation. Inhabitants were the most important stakeholders of constructing sustainable communities, thus their requirements should be considered at the starting point. Lastly, there were still arguments on the indicators weight and the standard values because the basic natural economic and social conditions are different among communities. In response, some new areas should be rising in the field of sustainable community research: (1) complexity theory and distributing intelligence should be introduced to analyze the demands of different stakeholders and dynamic developing progresses; (2) life cycle analysis and ecological footprint analysis could be applied to analyze the dynamic interaction between community and the outside environment; (3) the executive methods to integrate consulting experts knowledge and the demands of communities inhabitants in the process of designing the evaluating indicator systems should be developed. However, an objective and systematic evaluating indicator system framework with public participation were needed for sustainable communities.