Metabolomics is an emerging "omics" after genomics, proteomics and transcriptomics, which is often used in disease diagnosis, medical research and development, nutrition and food science, toxicology, environmental science, botany and other fields closely related to human health. Since the 20th century, the number of articles on metabonomics published every year has been increasing. In particular, the research of metabonomics in tumor is also increasing. On the surface, metabonomics is developing rapidly, but it still lags far behind genomics and proteomics. The emergence of metabonomics is the necessity of life science research. Metabonomics is a new subject for qualitative and quantitative analysis of small molecular metabolites in a certain organism or cell. Tumor is a common disease that seriously endangers human health and life, and all tumors are characterized by changes in cell metabolism. Therefore, metabolomics shows great potential in the screening of tumor metabolic markers, the evaluation of prognosis, and the design of drug targets.At present, metabonomics has been widely used in the study of various tumors, and with the continuous progress of metabonomics analysis platform, bioinformatics technology and the establishment of database, it will play a very important role in the clinical diagnosis and treatment of tumors. In this review, metabolomics and its research progress in tumor are reviewed.