In non-central relativistic heavy ion collisions, the colliding nuclear system possesses a huge global orbital angular momentum in the direction opposite to the normal of the reaction plane. Due to the spin-orbit coupling in strong interaction, such a huge orbital angular momentum leads to a global spin polarization of the quark matter system produced in the collision process. The global polarization effect in high energy heavy ion collisions was first predicted theoretically and confirmed by STAR experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory. The discovery has attracted much attention to the study of spin effects in heavy ion collision and leads to a new direction in high energy heavy ion physics—Spin Physics in Heavy Ion Collisions. In this paper, we briefly review the original ideas, the calculation methods, the main results and recent theoretical developments in last years. First, we present a short discussion of the spin-orbit coupling which is an intrinsic property for a relativistic fermionic quantum system. Then we review how the global orbital angular momentum can be generated in non-central heavy ion collisions and how the global orbital angular momentum can be transferred to the local orbital angular momentum distribution in two limit model---Landan fireball model and Bjorken scaling model. After that, we review how we can describe the scattering process with initial local orbital angular momentum in the formalism of scattering cross section in impact parameter space and how we calculate the polarization of the quarks and antiquarks in quark gluon plasma produced in non-central heavy ion collisions after single or multiple scattering. We also give a brief review on how the global polarization can be predicted from the formalism of relativistic hydrodynamics with the generalized Cooper-Frye formula with spin. Finally, we discuss how the quark's polarization can be transferred to the final hadron's polarization. We focus on the hyperon's polarization and vector meson's spin alignment produced in heavy-ion collisions.