Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is increasingly prevalent area of research. Generally, WSN consists of thousands of sensor nodes. Radio signal is utilized by these sensor nodes to interact with each other. In the WSN design, numerous issues are restricted battery, storage, transmission power and computational power etc. Routing and clustering have been utilized to address these problems. Problems arising in clustering and routing can be resolved by nature inspired optimization approach based on meta-heuristic techniques. The presented study compares the latest clustering routing algorithms with an emphasis on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based metaheuristic approaches in WSNs. While comparing strategies that have developed innovative cluster-based routing protocols inference can be drawn that main goal of clustering routing protocol is, to lower WSN energy consumption. This paper further provides a comparative study of PSO-based clustering routing protocols mainly focusing on applied metaheuristic optimization methods, various network features and implemented network structures in WSN.