This paper is a survey on the area of signature-based Gr\"obner basis
algorithms that was initiated by Faug\`ere's F5 algorithm in 2002. We explain
the general ideas behind the usage of signatures. We show how to classify the
various known variants by 3 different orderings. For this we give translations
between different notations and show that besides notations many approaches are
just the same. Moreover, we give a general description of how the idea of
signatures is quite natural when performing the reduction process using linear
algebra. This survey shall help to outline this field of active research.Comment: 53 pages, 8 figures, 11 table