The social-ecological systems (SES) framework is one of the most widely used methods in the field of social-ecological system research, which analyses the key elements and interactions of social-ecological systems and provides solutions for diverse and complex problems through action situation analysis. However, systematic summaries of its development dynamics, research approaches, and application fields are rare in the literature, which is not conducive to more researchers understanding and applying this method, and would also affect its further development. Therefore, this article sorted out and summarized the above issues combined with bibliometric analysis, and discussed the shortcomings of the SES framework research and its improving directions. Firstly, the SES framework has been improving since it was proposed by Ostrom in 2009. Its research has broadly gone through three phases of initial stage, sustained growth, and rapid development. Secondly, the research procedures of the framework can be summarized as focusing on core problems, selecting key variables and evaluating the results. Thirdly, the application fields are focused on three aspects: attribute study, comprehensive management analysis and public policy evaluation. From the existing research, the core problems have covered specific issues of multiple scales and types of social-ecological systems; the first-level variables focused on Resource Systems, Resource Units, Governance Systems and Actors, while the use frequency of the second-level variables varied in each application fields because of the different research focus; the evaluation of system results was mainly based on qualitative analysis, and the introduction of quantitative methods helped to quantify some of the variables. Given to the characteristics of multi-disciplinary integration, wide application range and flexible use of variables, the SES framework has strong effectiveness and applicability to social-ecological system research. However, there are still some deficiencies in the existing research. The first problem is that SES framework does not clearly present the definition of variables. And the existing studies are weak in analysing the differential characteristics and interaction links of the system across scales and its dynamical evolution patterns. Therefore, future research should focus on the definition, selection and measurement standards of variables, and strengthen spatial-temporal research on social-ecological system interaction.