Determinant and Pfaffian solutions of soliton equations

The solutions to many soliton systems have been found or reexpressed in terms of Wronskian or Grammian determinants or Pfaffians of various types. This paper gives an introduction to the techniques used to verify such solutions and reviews some of the most important results obtained in this direction over the last 30 years. It places emphasis on the universal nature of the formulae for derivatives and the identities satisfied by these objects. It contains a detailed, but not exhaustive, set of references