Objective Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are a kind of persistent organic pollutants that exist widely in various environmental media. As one of the most important ways to eliminate PAHs pollution in the environment, microbial degradation has been widely studied in the past few decades. Many of the polluted environmental media may undergo anaerobic states or remain in anaerobic states, e.g. paddy soils, bottom soils, wetlands, sediments, water. However, existing studies mainly focused on the aerobic environment and paid less attention to the anaerobic environment. Considering the current situation, this study systematically and comprehensively illustrates the research status of anaerobic microbial degradation of PAHs.Method The core collection database of Web of Science was used as the data source to conduct a bibliometric analysis of published literature in this field, with the aid of two pieces of software, VOSviewer and CiteSpace. The main contents of the bibliometric analysis included the year of publication, disciplines, keywords frequencies, keywords co-occurrence and most cited papers. In addition, by classifying different electron acceptors based on their reducing sequence, this paper discussed the research progress regarding anaerobic microbial degradation of PAHs in denitrification, metal ion reducing, sulfate reducing and methanogenesis conditions, respectively, with a focus on typical degrading microbes and mechanisms. On this basis, the existing theoretical gaps and future development trends in the field of PAHs anaerobic microbial degradation in the soil were discussed emphatically.Result The results showed that since 1991, the number of studies in this field showed the trend of fluctuating growth but was still relatively small on the whole, and most of them only focused on low-ring PAHs, especially naphthalene. Among the four different reducing systems, denitrification and sulfate reducing systems were studied more extensively, while less attention was paid to metal ion reducing and methanogenesis systems. Most significantly, the majority of mechanical studies remained at a relatively superficial level, without exposing the biological mechanisms of PAHs anaerobic microbial degradation and the interactions between functional microbes. Emerging technologies have not been commonly used in this field. Most studies were based on pure culture or environmental media such as water and sediment, but few were based on soil system.Conclusion As a result, there are still many theoretical gaps in the understanding of anaerobic microbial degradation of PAHs in the soil at present. Soil is the main site for the confluence and accumulation of PAHs in the environment. In the future, researchers should try to combine Compound-specific Stable Isotope Analysis (CSIA), DNA-stable isotope probing(DNA-SIP), Omics and other emerging technologies with traditional research methods to explore the mechanisms of PAHs anaerobic microbial degradation in the soil from a variety of different aspects, and verify the applicability of existing theories and experience to the soil, so as to fill the current theoretical gaps and promote the microbial remediation of PAHs pollution in anaerobic soil.