One of the exciting topics of weed science is to identify the most important ecological and management variables influencing the composition of arable weed communities. This paper reviews the findings of relevant publications from the last 15 years. According to floristic approaches six ecological (altitude, sea-sonality, temperature, precipitation, soil pH, soil texture) and three management variables (crop, preceding crop, degree of intensification) were most often identi-fied as the most important factors determining the species composition of arable weed communities. It can be concluded that there is a general positive correlation between the length of a gradient and its importance. According to functional approaches the most frequent correlations were found between the plant traits of stature, seed size, seed production, germination time, flowering period, life form and some specific variables.