Comparative studies of English and Chinese for academic purposes discuss the relations between language and culture in the context of English and Chinese academic texts, combining Contrastive Rhetoric, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and Chinese for Academic Purposes (CAP) into a new research area. This paper reviews the research articles published from 1991 to 2020, introducing the background and development of comparative studies of EAP and CAP, particularly comparing their major methods, linguistic features, conclusions, difficulties and problems. With an initial focus on text structure and then on realization of interpersonal meaning, these studies usually adopt the methods of Contrastive Rhetoric, Genre Analysis and Corpus Linguistics, describe similarities and differences in the structure and lexis of English and Chinese academic texts, and explain the similarities and differences in terms of language, culture, writing strategies, and so on. The research prospects are predicted with regard to the English-Chinese differences, the corpus size, addition of more disciplines, comparison of phrases, and qualitative and quantitative analysis.