With the rapid development of wireless communication, the confliction between the scarce frequency resources and the low spectral efficiency caused by the stationary spectrum sharing strategies seriously restricts the evolution of the future mobile communication. For this purpose, cognitive radio (CR) emerges as one of the most promising inventions which can overcome the spectrum shortage. As the key technology and main objective of CR, spectrum sharing can make full use of the limited spectrum, alleviate the scarcity of frequency resources and improve the system utilities, playing thereby an important role in improving the system performance of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In this survey, the spectrum sharing in CRNs is discussed in terms of the sharing process, mainstream sharing technologies and spectrum sharing models. In particular, comparisons of different spectrum sharing strategies are concluded, as well as that of different spectrum sensing schemes in sharing procedure. Moreover, some application examples of the spectrum sharing in CRNs, such as smart grid, public safety, cellular network and medical body area networks are also introduced. In addition, our previous related works are presented and the open research issues in the field of spectrum sharing are stated as well.