Maritime transportation serves as a vital foundation for promoting economic globalization, ensuring the smooth flow of trade and goods. Enhancing the resilience of transportation safety is therefore a critical measure for achieving sustainable, reliable, and efficient international transportation systems in the face of evolving global challenges. Currently, ports and waterways along the Maritime Silk Road (MSR) face a range of complex and uncertain factors, such as frequent natural disasters, intricate non-traditional safety issues, the development of large-scale and low-carbon shipping equipment and so on, which put forward urgent requests for the construction of the resilient shipping system. By examining maritime transportation safety research from a resilience perspective, this paper took the Maritime Silk Road as the research target. It reviewed significant achievements in this area, focusing on the current state of academic research, the measurement of transportation resilience, and the application of safety resilience in the context of the Maritime Silk Road. Additionally, it proposed the directions and development suggestions for deepening the research on the resilience of maritime transportation safety from the perspectives of characteristics of resilience curve, theoretical research framework and objectivity. Future work should consider the resilience spiral curve, Environmental-Social-Governance (ESG) framework, and resilience governance research for new safety situations along the Maritime Silk Road.