Objective To summarize the important points of animal models of osteosarcoma and to provide a reference and suggestions to improve the modeling method and evaluation indexes. Methods Using osteosarcoma and animals as the main topics, literature on animal models of osteosarcoma from CNKI, Wanfang Data and PubMed. The species of experimental animals, gender, modeling method, types of cancer cell lines and detection indicators were summarized, and a database was established for statistical analysis. Results A total of 284 reports were included. The most selected osteosarcoma model animals were BALB/ c-nu/ nu mice (227 times, 75. 17%), followed by SD rats (20 times, 6. 62%). Subcutaneous cell fluid transplantation in the back (66 times, 21. 85%), subcutaneous cell fluid transplantation in the axils (55 times, 18. 21%), and in situ cell fluid transplantation (51 times, 16. 89%) were used as modeling method . Human MG-63 cells (100 times, 33. 11%) and mouse UMR-106 cells (39 times, 12. 91%) were selected as the cancer cell line. The most analyzed indexes were the tumor tissue apparent index (238 times, 83. 80%), HE staining of tumor tissue ( 129 times, 45. 42%), and Animal epigenetic metrics ( 94 times, 33. 10%), and immunohistochemistry of tumor tissue (89 times, 31. 34%). Conclusions At present, osteosarcoma BALB/ c-nu/ nu mice aged 4 to 6 weeks are used as experimental animals, and human MG-63 cell heterotopic transplantation (back and axillary transplantation) is used to establish the animal model, and the detection indexes of osteosarcoma are comprehensively evaluated by animal apparent index, tumor apparent index and tumor histopathology. It is suggested to select serum biochemical index, apparent index of tumor tissue as well, HE staining of tumor tissue and immunohistochemistry of tumor tissue to evaluate the model. However, there is still a lack of animal model preparation and evaluation criteria with high clinical consistency. In this paper, the advantages and disadvantages are summarized through literature mining and data analysis, in order to provide reference for the establishment of a good OS model and better application to OS mechanism research and new drug development.