This annual review is an overview of advances in the field of Raman spectroscopy as found in papers published in the previous calendar year in the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy (JRS), as well as in trends over the past decade across journals that have published papers important to the field of Raman spectroscopy. This information is gleaned from statistical data on article counts obtained from the Clarivate Analytic's Web of Science Core Collection by year and by subfield of Raman spectroscopy. Additional information is gleaned from presentations at the XXVI International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS 2018) in Jeju Island, Korea in August 2018, and contributions on Raman scattering at SCIX 2018, organized by the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA in October 2018. Coverage is also provided for topics from the European Conference on Nonlinear Optical Spetroscopy (ECONOS 2018) held in April in Milan, Italy and GeoRaman 2018 in Catania, Italy in June. Finally, papers published in JRS in 2017 are highlighted and arranged by topics at the frontier of Raman spectroscopy. On the basis of this survey information, it is clear that Raman spectroscopy continues as in recent years as a rapidly expanding field of research across a wide range of novel disciplines and applications that provide sensitive photonic information of matter at the molecular level.