The phenomenon of drought disaster chain caused by drought disaster and its secondary disasters has a great impact on natural environment, society, economy and so on. In order to review the current research of drought disaster chain, different definitions of drought disaster chain and its two development stages have been retrospected. Then the main contents of drought disaster chain has been summarized, including the classification of drought disaster chain, evolution mechanism and control measures. Moreover, the main research methods involved in the current research have also been reviewed, including qualitative analysis, correlation analysis, probability model based method, complex network based method, and so on. From the goal of building systematic disaster prevention and mitigation, the problems existing in the current research were finally identified. The top-level research design and quantitative results are still needed. In the future, with the support of multidisciplinary knowledge, we should establish the chain catastrophe theory and put forward a series of quantitative methods. The research of this paper will be helpful to systematically understand the current progress, key points and difficulties in drought disaster chain studies, and also provide some references for future research.