Rare earth ions doped Gd₂O₂S scintillators are new type of oxysulfide scintillators, which have been developed since 1980s. The Gd₂O₂S matrix with cross section of high density and high thermal neutron absorption has high X ray and thermal neutron stopping capacity. The doping of different rare earth ions (Pr³⁺, Tb³⁺, etc.) shows fast decay or high light yield, which plays a very important role in application of scintillation. Composition control of oxysulfide is always a key problem to be solved in the synthesis process. However, the high melting point of Gd₂O₂S material and the serious volatilization of sulfur restrict the preparation of Gd₂O₂S single crystals, with high optical quality and excellent scintillation performance. Ceramic is the main application form of Gd₂O₂S scintillation material. Its pure phase Gd ₂O₂S phosphors with small particle size, narrow particle size distribution and low agglomeration is the key to sintering high quality scintillation ceramics. These ceramics prepared by simply increasing the sintering temperature produce a large number of sulfur vacancies and oxygen vacancies, decreasing the scintillation properties. Therefore, preparation of Gd₂O₂S scintillation ceramics usually need pressure assistance to increase the production cost. In this paper, their scintillation mechanism and research situation are introduced firstly. Then, their fabrication process, solution of defects removal, research status and applications in neutron imaging and medical X-CT fields are overviewed. Finally, we summarized the previous and prospected the future development of Gd₂O₂S scintillation ceramics.