Zinc oxide (ZnO) has ideal qualities for various optoelectronic devices,such as UV photo-detectors,emitting diodes and laser diodes,based on p-n junctions.However,while high quality n-type ZnO has been available for many years,the fabrication of high quality reproducible and low resistivity p-type conduction for ZnO thin films is proven difficult because of the strong selfcompensation effect of intrinsic defects and other reasons.By summering and analyzing of some related papers published in recent years,this review focuses on the developments in p-type doping processes,and the characteristics including hole concentration,mobility and resistivity of p-type ZnO thin films prepared by different methods are listed.