Abstract: The principles, methods and determining of assessment parameters were emphatically described based on a review of previous priority pollutants screening programs both at home and abroad and, subsequently, several existing problems in the studies were pointed out. The findings revealed the list was not suitable for the present environment pollution status owing to the limitation of monitoring data, incomplete consideration of the factors and the lack of timely update. Therefore, future researches should be done corporately by the government, researchers, enterprises and the public, and it was suggested that ranking of priority pollutants should use the semi-determination scoring method based on the monitoring data.