Rosin was an important natural renewable forestry resource in our country, mainly composed of resin acids, which contained a tricyclic phenanthrene skeleton with conjugated double bond and carboxyl group, thus they could undergo various chemical reactions such as hydrogenation, disproportionation, addition, esterification, rearrangement and oxidation. Dehydroabietic acid whose skeleton contained an aromatic ring was obtained from rosin by catalytic disproportionation and purification. Based on the aromatic ring and carboxylic acid group, a variety of fluorescent derivatives could be developed, which opened up a new way for the high value utilization of rosin. In this paper, several types of fluorescent derivatives based on dehydroabietic acid aromatic ring, including acylated compounds, aromatic amines, heterocyclic compounds, Schiff base compounds and other compounds, and fluorescent derivatives based on carboxylic acid modification, such as dehydroabietylamine, heterocyclic compounds, and dehydroabietic acid carboxyl derivatives, were emphatically summarized. Their fluorescence properties and applications as luminescent materials in the fields of organic light-emitting devices, fluorescent probes and cell imaging, were reviewed. The current existing insufficient problems on the research of rosin-based fluorescent derivatives were discussed, such as the deficiency of blue and red light materials with high luminescence efficiency, lower luminescence efficiency in organic electroluminescent devices relying on solid film luminescence, and the insufficient research on the luminescence mechanism. In addition, development trends in the future were prospected.
