Black carbon (BC) is produced by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuel and biomass, formed a special kind of inhomogeneous carbonaceous particulate matter. BC is highly recalcitrant and persists in the environment for millennia. It is of great significance in the global climate change and environment system, and become the focus of current international earth and environmental sciences. Due to the different combustion condition and the fuel source, the physical and chemical properties of the BC component are complex and highly variable, and the environmental behaviors and effects are also obviously different. Therefore, the source apportionment of BC is very important. It is more conducive to find out the global carbon balance and better know the migration and transformation progress in different environmental media. This paper mainly summarizes the current knowledge of the source apportionment methods of BC as well as the research progress of its application. Finally we put forward the future development direction of methods for BC source apportionment. Stable carbon and radiocarbon isotope analysis are the two mostly used methods in the source apportionment of BC, and the combination of them can not only provide more accurate information of BC source, and can quantitatively estimate the contribution of biomass burning and fossil fuel to BC. The methods of biomarkers ratios of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the ratio of BC to organic carbon (OC), molecular marker ratios of benzene polycarboxylic acids (BPCAs), and morphological analysis can only indirectly determine the BC sources, and the application has limitations and uncertainties. There is a need for further strengthen the study of fractionation mechanism of delta13C in different media and the domain features of delta13C and 14C for BC in different samples of emission source, and standardize protocols within individual methods for BC analysis. Moreover, there is an ongoing need to give full play to the advantages of different analytical technologies, combined a variety of methods will provide more information about sources, translocation and transformation progresses of BC.