Comparing, validating and assessing the accuracy of dynamic models is crucial for multiple applications in the field of energy, buildings and indoor environmental engineering. To that matter, various comparison metrics and key performance indicators have been developed or borrowed from other fields of science, and a few popular guidelines have recommended some of them for building energy models. This article aims at giving an overview of what metrics are used by the community of researchers in the field of energy, buildings and indoor environment. This overview is based on a large-scale review work of 259 scientific publications from the last 40 years. This paper also discusses the main trends, reveals certain gaps and suggests several research activities currently being undertaken by a multi-institutional working group of researchers, which should greatly benefit the entire community of building energy and indoor environment simulation.