The evolution of the content of heavy elements in galaxies, the relative chemical abundances, their spatial distribution, and how these scale with various galactic properties, provide unique information on the galactic evolutionary processes across the cosmic epochs. In recent years major progress has been made in constraining the chemical evolution of galaxies and inferring key information relevant to our understanding of the main mechanisms involved in galaxy evolution. In this review we provide an overview of these various areas. After an overview of the methods used to constrain the chemical enrichment in galaxies and their environment, we discuss the observed scaling relations between metallicity and galaxy properties, the observed relative chemical abundances, how the chemical elements are distributed within galaxies, and how these properties evolve across the cosmic epochs. We discuss how the various observational findings compare with the predictions from theoretical models and numerical cosmological simulations. Finally, we briefly discuss the open problems and the prospects for major progress in this field in the nearby future.

星系中重元素含量的演化、相对化学丰度、它们的空间分布，以及这些元素如何与各种星系特性进行缩放，提供了有关整个宇宙时代的星系演化过程的独特信息。近年来，在限制星系的化学演化和推断与我们理解星系演化主要机制相关的关键信息方面取得了重大进展。在这篇评论中，我们概述了这些不同的领域。在概述了用于限制星系及其环境中化学富集的方法之后，我们讨论了观测到的金属丰度和星系属性之间的标度关系、观测到的相对化学丰度、化学元素在星系内的分布以及这些属性如何演化跨越宇宙纪元。我们讨论如何将各种观测结果与理论模型和数值宇宙学模拟的预测进行比较。最后，我们简要讨论了该领域尚未解决的问题以及近期取得重大进展的前景。