Microplasma is produced by confining the dimension of plasma to a limited space.As a new type of excitation source，microplasma has the advantages of low power consumption，small size and low cost，and shows a great application potential in the miniaturization of optical emission spectrometric instruments.In this paper，the new applications of optical emission spectrometric（OES）systems based on microplasma excitation sources in the field of analytical chemistry are introduced.At present，microplasma OES system is not only able to use in the direct determination of analytes in gas or liquid phase，but also possesses a series of coupling techniques with gas chromatography（GC），chemical vapor generation（CVG），electrothermal vaporization（ETV），microelectrodialysis（μED）and capillary electrophoresis（CE），greatly expanding the scope of its application.In the future，the performance of the microplasma OES system will be further improved by enhancing the excitation capability of the microplasma itself and choosing a suitable sampling approach.At the same time，the development for related instruments will provide a reliable tool for the field analysis on trace elements.