Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disease that has gradually increased in incidence in recent years, is easily overlooked in clinical diagnosis, and severely affects the quality of life of patients. Elucidating its pathogenesis and treating it from both etiology and symptomatology perspectives are crucial for the clinical recovery of CFS patients. However, due to the unclear pathogenesis, the etiological treatment options are limited, and current treatments mainly focus on improving clinical symptoms. In this context, establishing a good animal model and effectively evaluating it is particularly important. This article comprehensively integrates the diagnostic criteria of CFS and the progress of basic research, summarizes the behavioral experiment methods related to model evaluation involved in CFS basic research in the past five years, and discusses it for the first time from five aspects: general condition evaluation, fatigue state evaluation, cognitive function evaluation, emotional state evaluation, and pain degree evaluation. The purpose is to present the current situation, expose problems, trigger reflection, and promote improvement.