An overview of monitoring schemes from a class called generally weighted moving average (GWMA) is provided. A GWMA scheme is an extended version of the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) scheme with an additional adjustment parameter that introduces more flexibility in the GWMA model as it adjusts the kurtosis of the weighting function so that the GWMA scheme can be designed such that it has an advantage over the corresponding EWMA scheme in the detection of certain shift values efficiently. The parametric and distribution-free GWMA schemes to monitor various quality characteristics and its existing enhanced versions (i.e. double GWMA, composite Shewhart-GWMA, mixed GWMA-CUSUM and mixed CUSUM-GWMA) have better performance than their corresponding EWMA counterparts in many situations; hence, all such existing research works discussing GWMA-related schemes (i.e. 61 publications in total) are documented and categorized in such a manner that it is easy to identify research gaps. Finally, a number of possible future research ideas are provided.