Abstract: The seismic response of the system, which includes the adjacent surface and subsurface structures, will be affected considering the dynamic interaction in the soils. The interaction effect cannot be ignored because the scale of the underground structures turns to be larger and they are closer to the surface structures. The definition of structure-soil-structure interaction is extended, which includes the surface structure-soil-surface structure interaction and the underground structure-soil-surface structure interaction. The existing researches on this topic are summarized and analyzed. It can be concluded that the spacing of the adjacent structures, sizes of the structures, characteristics of the soils and seismic waves are the key factors to influence the interaction effect of the system. However, the studies on the factors such as nonlinearity of material, nonlinearity of soils, and spatial effect of ground motion, and relevant large-scale three-dimensional calculation and analysis are relatively few. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to clarify the existing researches and developments on this topic and to extract the key scientific problems in the complex dynamic interaction system.