Soybean, the main source of protein and edible oil, is the most sensitive bean crop to water supply. Drought severely affected soybean yield and quality. Soybean germplasms with drought tolerance plays an important role for soybean production in arid and semi-arid areas. The paper summarized the research advances of drought tolerance of soybean from the aspects of the mechanism of drought effect on soybean, soybean drought-tolerance mechanism, common research methods and the evaluation methods.