Maintenance of stable mutualistic pattern between flowering plants and pollinators is key to the population fitness of the interacting partners. Under the background of global change, different responses to the external disturbances such as temperature, snow melting, and human activities may cause the asynchronously phenological responses between plant and pollinators. This phenomenon will reduce the phenological overlap and change the costs and benefits of interaction, then make a far-reaching influence on the population dynamics of both (i.e., the phenological mismatch effect). In recent years, studies on phenological mismatch between plant flowering and pollinator activities have focused on two aspects:one was the cause and mechanism of phenological mismatch, and another was the ecological impacts caused by phenological mismatch, especially the impacts on the population dynamics of the reciprocal parties. However, due to the limitations of research methods and data acquisition, there are still some weaknesses in phenological mismatch research, including the response mechanism of phenological match pattern to environmental change, the adjustment of pollination efficiency to mismatch effect, and the independence of phenological data acquisition. Based on the latest research progress of phenological mismatch effect, this paper first introduced the phenological matching relationship between plants and pollinators, then reviewed the causes of phenological mismatch effect and the current research methods of mismatch effect as well as its ecological impacts, and finally made a preliminary discussion on the future research prospects, in order to provide useful references for the researches of species diversity and rational prediction of animal and plant population dynamics.