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[Objective] Air pollution is closely associated with humans and is of major concern. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are included in China's "14th Five-Year Plan" air pollution indicators in 2021, becoming one of the important tasks to control air pollution. VOCs adversely affect the environment, causing urban and photochemical smog, leading to physical and mental health hazards for residents. Investigating the emission characteristics of VOCs can offer a scientific basis for the efficient control and emission reduction of VOCs. Local scholars have been actively participating in research and development of air pollution reduction technologies and have established a national emission inventory for application to national mobile source emission reduction work. With the progress of research on land-based stationary sources and road vehicle emissions, VOC emissions in urban functional areas have been gradually and effectively controlled. Although the development of the water transport industry has brought huge economic benefits, it has also worsened VOC emissions in the surrounding port areas. Performing research on VOC emissions in port areas is the groundwork for attaining efficient VOC control. [Methods] In this work, the sources of atmospheric VOC pollutants in ports are listed: port transportation vehicles, port machinery, and dry/liquid bulk terminals. The characteristic pollutants are alkanes, olefins, and aromatic hydrocarbons. Currently, local scholars are primarily concerned about VOC emissions from key ports and hub waterways along the eastern coast, while foreign scholars are concerned about port emission monitoring and have successively established relevant actions for port emission restrictions. Moreover, mobile sources of VOCs from fuel-fuel-powered ship power units during port operations are examined. Many computational models have been employed to simulate the diffusion process of urban VOCs and analyze the main VOC components that influence ozone formation, such as the Gaussian diffusion model and the HYSPLIT model. [Results] In this work, we analyze the classification of VOC emission monitoring technologies, as well as their application status and characteristics. We also demonstrate how air pollution monitoring equipment can be used in the port area to identify pollution sources and rapidly detect VOCs, offering strong technical support for studying VOC emission characteristics in the port area. Several large-scale and high-precision monitoring methods are not appropriate for air pollution monitoring in port areas, making it difficult to acquire basic information and activity level data of ships, leading to insufficient accumulation of VOC emission data in port areas and the need to expand monitoring coverage. [Conclusions] Most of the emission studies of ships in port areas are based on the fuel consumption method, which cannot be systematically analyzed for ship emission characteristics, and numerous air pollution diffusion analysis models have not been implemented in air pollution emission studies in port areas. Hence, based on the characteristics of VOC emissions in port areas, selecting and improving the adaptive calculation model is urgently needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]