The structural development in bridge engineering along with efficiency have got much attention in few decades. Leading to the development, Optimization of structure established on mathematical analysis emerged mostly employed strategies for productive and sustainable design in the bridge engineering. Despite the widespread knowledge, there has yet to be a rigorous examination of recent structural optimization exploration development. Thus, the primary objectives of this paper are to critically review previous structural optimization research, provide a detailed examination of optimization goals and outline recent research field limitations and provide guidelines for future research proposal in the field of bridge engineering structural optimization. This article begins by outlining the relevance of efficiency and sustainability in the bridge construction, as well as the work done required for this review. Suitable papers are gathered and followed by a statistical analysis of the selected publications. Following that, the selected papers are evaluated in terms of the optimization targets as well as their spatial patterns. Structure's optimization four key steps, including modeling, optimization techniques, formulation of optimization concerns and computational tools, are also researched and examined in depth. Finally, research gaps in contemporary works are identified, as well as suggested guidance for future works.