Luminescent materials play indispensable roles in many application areas such as lighting, advanced displays, bio-imaging, medical treatments, sensing and detection. Pursuing new luminescent materials with improved or desired properties is an endless mission, driven by increasing demands of advances in technologies and applications. The traditional trial-and-error method, usually based on intensive ex-periments, cannot search for new materials in a fast and efficient way, therefore altative model- or theory-based approaches for materials discovery need to be developed. In this work we overviewed several promising methods for screening and discovering novel luminescent materials, including solid state combinatorial chemistry, chemical unit substitution, single particle diagnosis and high-throughput calculations. These methods, having their own merits and demerits, enable to search for new phosphor materials with interesting properties for white light-emitting diodes (wLEDs) rapidly and efficiently. Finally, data-driven discovery of materials is emphasized as a state-of-art approach.