Abstract: Source apportionment of heavy metals in sediments is significant to distinguish the influence of human activities from nature changes on offshore eco-environment evolution. This overview focused on three widely used source apportionment methods: Multivariate statistical technique, geochemical method and geostatistical analysis and highlighted that the positive matrix factorization and lead isotopic trace were two relatively preferable methods to quantitatively assess the anthropogenic source of heavy metals. Based on the heavy metal concentrations in coastal sediments of China, heavy metals were primarily of anthropogenic origin with their contribution close to or higher than 50% in coastal sediment of China evaluated by combination of different source identification me-thods (multivariate analysis, estimation based on background value and lead isotopic trace), and estuaries and bays were typical polluted regions. The current researches on source apportionment had the problems that the source endmembers were still vague and the interpretation of data lacks corresponding reliability evaluation. The future research should be focused on the integration and optimization of multi-methods to improve the accuracy of source apportionment, extracting informative indicators to represent specific anthropogenic activities or natural source and recognizing the geoche-mical process and mechanism of anthropogenic emissions of heavy metals when entering into coastal environment to provide referential fingerprints for source interpretation.