Within the scope of Business Process Management (BPM), process modeling represents an initial phase in which working procedures are depicted in form of process models. In connection with this, the graphical modeling language Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has established itself as a standard for process modeling. Past BPMN research has developed satisfactory solutions for the topics evaluation, semantics, execution and compliance. These results provide a formal basis for associated research and industrial applications. BPMN research is now at a stage where new research topics have to be identified meeting user needs as well as future requirements of process modeling and BPM. With regard to this challenge, the present work examines previous BPMN research on the base of an extensive literature review. Past research results are summarized and current research approaches are presented in a detailed and coherent manner. Building on this, new BPMN topics, which may be important for future research activities, are presented. The analysis shows that current BPMN research is a fragmented topic area which has various content-related interfaces with neighboring and superordinated research topics. It is also found that future scientific works concerning BPMN can benefit from consolidating and innovative research measures.