With the rapid increase of 3D model on the internet, it is necessary to develop a convenient and reliable content-based 3D shape (model) search engine. Sketch has the ability to express concept as a visual icon, which is in line with the human habit of passing information, and thus becomes an important interactive means in 3D shape retrieval. However, there is often a larger semantic gap between the standard 3D shape representation and the 2D sketch which expresses human consciousness, which brings a lot of technical challenges to the sketch-based shape retrieval. In this paper, the relevant background and technological advances on the sketch-based 3D shape retrieval were introduced, and the latest methods that use context information to fill the semantic gap were particularly focused on.