At present, the limited existence of fossil fuels and the environmental issues over greenhouse gas emissions have been directly affected to the transition from conventional vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs). In fact, the electrification of transportation system and the growing demand of EVs have prompted recent researchers to investigate the optimal location of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs). However, there are numerous challenges would face when implementing EVs at large scale. For instance, underdeveloped EVCSs infrastructure, optimal EVCS locations, and charge scheduling in EVCSs. In addition, the most fundamental EV questions, such as EV cost and range, could be partly answered only by a well-developed EVCS infrastructure. According to the literature, the researchers have been followed different types of approaches, objective functions, constraints for problem formulation. Moreover, according to the approaches, objective functions, constraints, EV load modeling, uncertainty, vehicle to grid strategy, integration of distributed generation, charging types, optimization techniques, and sensitivity analysis are reviewed for the recent research articles. Furthermore, optimization techniques for optimal solution are also reviewed in this article. In addition, the EV load impact on the distribution network, environmental impacts and economic impact are discussed.