Structural systems often show nonlinear behavior under severe excitations generated by natural hazards. In that condition, the restoring force becomes highly nonlinear showing significant hysteresis. The hereditary nature of this nonlinear restoring force indicates that the force cannot be described as a function of the instantaneous displacement and velocity. Accordingly, many hysteretic restoring force models were developed to include the time dependent nature using a set of differential equations. This survey contains a review of the past, recent developments and implementations of the Bouc-Wen model which is used extensively in modeling the hysteresis phenomenon in the dynamically excited nonlinear structures.