Purpose <p>Understanding the educational needs of surgeons can help organizations such as the Association for Surgical Education to develop relevant solutions. No prior study has systematically assessed the literature for such needs. The aim of this study was to review the surgical education literature to identify studies relevant to the educational needs of surgeons.</p> Methods <p>Following the PRISMA statement guideline for literature search, we performed a narrative review with three search terms including needs assessment, surgery, and education on PubMed and Scopus in tandem with three inclusion criteria, (1) literature from January 2017 to January 2023, (2) peer-reviewed journal articles only, and (3) surgical specialties except for dentistry-based surgical specialties, and six exclusion criteria, (1) clinical education or clinical care, (2) patient education or patient care, (3) nurse education, (4) physician assistant education, (5) non-surgical medical student education, and (6) non- surgical specialty, to identify the literature pertinent to educational needs in surgery. Through content analysis of the identified literature, we inquired about the objectives, methods, data sources, and conclusions in each article to determine the categories, specialties, stakeholders, and topics of educational needs in surgical education literature. A heatmap analysis of educational needs categories and topics was used to synthesize the data and present the overview of the needs in surgical education literature. Descriptive statistics of frequency were used to present the data.</p> Results <p>Two hundred one peer-reviewed journal articles were reviewed. The content analysis identified four areas, including the categories of educational needs, surgical specialties, stakeholders, and topics of educational needs. To synthesize the results of the data analysis, a heatmap was created with the cross-section of the trends and topics of educational needs, showing the hot topics and potential gaps in surgical education literature.</p> Conclusions <p>The narrative review provides surgical educators and trainees with an overview of the educational needs in the literature that can serve as a roadmap of educational needs to be taken into consideration by organizations, such as the Association for Surgical Education (ASE) to help address the needs and advance the field. As this review only investigates recent trends of educational needs in two databases, future studies of a full systematic review on this topic may generate more insights.</p>