Electrical machines are important devices that convert electric energy into mechanical work and are widely used in industry and people’s life. Undesired vibrations are harmful to their safe operation. Reviews from the viewpoint of fault diagnosis have been conducted, while summaries from the perspective of dynamics is rare. This review provides systematic research outlines of this field, which can help a majority of scholars grasp the ongoing progress and conduct further investigations. This review mainly generalizes publications in the past decades about the dynamics and vibration of electrical machines. First the sources of electromagnetic vibration in electrical machines are presented, which include mechanical and electromagnetic factors. Different types of air gap eccentricity are introduced and modeled. The analytical methods and numerical methods for calculating the electromagnetic force are summarized and explained in detail. The exact subdomain analysis, magnetic equivalent circuit, Maxwell stress tensor, winding function approach, conformal mapping method, virtual work principle and finite element analysis are presented. The effects of magnetic saturation, slot and pole combination and load are discussed. Then typical characteristics of electromagnetic vibration are illustrated. Finally, the experimental studies are summarized and the authors give their thoughts about the research trends.