Abstract: Drug repositioning (also known as drug repurposing or drug reprofiling) is the process of applying existing therapeutics to new disease indications. Due to the high cost and high failure rate of research and development of new drugs, the repositioning of existing drugs has become a hot topic of current research. With the help of high-throughput sequencing technology, many effective algorithms have been proposed and applied to drug repositioning. Current algorithms for the repositioning of drugs and chemical compounds can be divided into three categories:feature-based, matrix-based and network-based relocation or decomposition. With a view to helping Chinese researchers to develop more effective drug relocation algorithms and increasing the social and economic benefits of our country, this paper reviews the three commonly used methods, summarizes their advantages and disadvantages, and analyzes the future development direction of drug repositioning.