Cancer is a disease characterized by abnormal cell proliferation,and about one-sixth of mortalities are caused by cancer.Chemotherapy is one of the main means in anti-cancer treatment,in which nucleoside analogs play a major role.At present,the clinically used nucleoside analogs cannot effectively control cancer for a long time due to the lack of selectivity and relatively high side effects,thus much progress has been made for the improvement of the class of drugs.This article discusses the classification of nucleoside analogs and the research progress in recent years.