We survey results concerning special elements of nine types (modular, lower-modular, upper-modular, cancellable, distributive, codistributive, standard, costandard and neutral elements) in the lattice of all semigroup varieties and certain its sublattices, mainly in the lattices of all commutative varieties and of all overcommutative ones. Several open questions are formulated. The work is regularly updated and modified as new results and/or articles appear.

Compared with the previous version, the items [8] and [36] in the References are updated, and the item [9] is added. This is the final version. We will not further update the survey in case of new results and/or publications appear