Abstract: Dent, a common mechanical damage on pipelines, is associated with a significant local plastic deformation. Dents can cause pipeline failures, especially when they are combined with other types of defects such as gouges, fatigue, corrosion, and cracks. In this work, a systematic review of various assessment methods and standards for pipeline dents, including the combination of a dent with other defects, is conducted. Generally, the methods available today are not sufficiently accurate and reliable to assess pipeline dents, especially the dent-defect combinations. For plain dents on pipelines, both the depth-based criterion and the strain-based criterion are commonly used in engineering. Their main problems include inaccuracy and conservatism. For a dent combined with other defects, the existing assessment techniques are not mature enough to give reliable results. Both experimental testing and numerical modeling through finite element (FE) analysis are capable of investigating the influence of dents and dent-defect combinations on burst failure pressure of the pipelines, although an approximation to the reality is still the main difficulty existing in the experimental testing and FE analysis. Nowadays, relevant studies on assessment techniques for plain dents, a dent with fatigue and a dent with a single gouge have been common in literature. The combinations of a dent with corrosion or cracks have been rarely assessed due to complicated mechanisms involving a multi-physics coupling effect. Development of novel assessment methods by integrating mechanical stress and strain, electrochemical reactions and steel metallurgy will be a key topic to accurately assess the dent-defect combinations for improved pipeline integrity.