It has been 90 years since the market town in Song period became a new research topic in 1920s. Previous academic reviews focused on the introduction of existing research findings, but ignored the researchers’ assumptions, methods and judgments, which makes it necessary to summarize and review the academic history of this topic once again. The 90-year research history can be divided into two periods. Literature review shows that before 1980s, researchers focused on the characteristics of the market town in Song Dynasty. Since 1980s they have paid more attention to the number and size of market towns, their geographical distribution, the number of registered permanent residents, the commercial tax, etc. They have tried to define the market town as well as the general situation of the commodity economy of Song Dynasty from a variety of dimensions. The aim of using quantitative methods in research is to study the research object from an independent, external and objective perspective. With qualitative methods, researchers often use the language used in the historical records to interpret and define the research object from a neutral and objective perspective in order to eliminate assumptions and preconceptions. In reality, however, researchers always begin their studies with some guiding assumption no matter whether they adopt the quantitative or qualitative method. Undoubtedly, one of these guiding assumptions is evolutionism. Under the influence of the theory of evolution, people are used to seeing the history of the market town in Song Dynasty as having a clear main axis of point-line-plane development, i.e. from the rudimentary stage to prosperity. A lot of regional studies and case studies on the market town in Song Dynasty are also detailed expositions of this point-line-plane theory. In these detailed studies, a local market town is a microcosm of the whole big picture. The market at the earliest stage was opened at irregular intervals. Later the intervals became more regular and then the name ″market″ or ″Xu″ (墟) appeared. Since the Northern and Southern Song Dynasties, some of them were upgraded to towns with the development of commodity exchange. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the increasing number and expanding scale of the market towns indicated that they had entered into the stage of sustained prosperity. This kind of structured narrative of economic development has been the mainstream of the research on the market town in Song Dynasty. By this theory, many researchers have observed and analyzed the commodity economy represented by the market form and the urban system like the market town of the traditional society. This narrative approach is insightful and is very helpful for understanding the conditions of China’s social transition to the modern society. But when historians get addicted to the so-called point-line-plane framework in the development of commodity economy, they tend to neglect the colorful life scenes in historical records. These records provide not only the key words for an economic explanation, but also the values, ideas, customs, social relations, social order, etc. which go beyond the economic level. They are hard to be quantified and have to be defined again in a different system. Therefore, only through altering the existing research practices and mind-set can the study of the market town in Song Dynasty go further.