This paper reviews the research development of freezing-thawing rock mechanics, focusing on papers related with the freezing-thawing rock mechanics in the database of Web of Science and Chinese Academic Periodical Full Text during 2001 to 2012．From the searched results,it can be seen that the number of research papers on freezing-thawing rock mechanics is in rapid growth in the last 12 years and that the research foundation in China is not good and not many papers in the field are published. Meanwhile,it is shown that the number of papers and dissertations during the period of 2007-2012 increases by 108.8% and 236.4% compared to the period of 2001-2006, which indicates that the domestic studies of the freezing-thawing rock mechanics are in a booming state in trends. Some papers related to the freezing-thawing rock mechanics published in these periodicals in recent years are specially analyzed．Studies of physical properties and damage mechanisms are briefly reviewed and some issues worth further studies are pointed out.