We briefly review various mappings of fermion pairs to bosons, including those based on mapping operators, such as Belyaev-Zelevinskii, and those on mapping states, such as Marumori; in particular we consider the work of Otsuka-Arima-Iachello, aimed at deriving the Interacting Boson Model. We then give a rigorous and unified description of state-mapping procedures which allows one to systematically go beyond Otsuka-Arima-Iachello and related approaches, along with several exact results.