Microplastic pollution in the marine and freshwater environment is a global hot issue in recent years. The most important problem while conducting research on microplastics is to distinguish pollutants from complex environmental media. At present, there have been abundant strategies for detection and analysis of microplastics, however, in order to make results comparable, it is urgent to seek unified and standardized separation, extraction, identification and quantification methods for microplastics. On the basis of summarizing the common and reliable separation and extraction steps including density separation, screening, filtration and digestion, elaborating qualitative identification methods such as thermal analysis ,spectral analysis and presenting statistical quantification methods such as eyesight statistics and fluorescence analysis, the future trend of detecting and analyzing microplastics is proposed, which would benefit ecological and environmental risk assessment of microplastics.