The element abundances in galaxies are a critical tool to understand the processes driving galaxy formation and evolution. I will give a brief overview of the current status of the observations, especially on gas-phase metallicity, and on how these observations help constraining the models of galaxy evolution. Integrated scaling relations of total abundance and abundance ratios are especially informative, and in recent years both observations and numerical models have started to obtain enough spatial resolution to study these relation on a local scale. I will show as, despite many years of work, many uncertainties remain.
