The Latin American and Caribbean Literature on Health Sciences Database (LILACS) is a cooperative product of the Latin American and Caribbean Centre on Health Sciences Information, coordinated by BIREME.
The Cooperating Centers of the Latin America and Caribbean countries include: the libraries of the network or national information systems; the Pan American Health Organization – PAHO Documentation Centers, Representations in the countries of the Region, Special Regional Centers and Headquarter Library. All of them contribute to the LILACS database. A Coordinating Centre in each country is responsible for the activities of the National Coordinating Institutions concerning to LILACS database. BIREME is the LILACS Coordinating Institution at regional level, and at national level for Brazil.
The Cooperating Centers are responsible for collecting, analyzing, and processing the literature produced in their countries, in predefined areas of action, either geographic (institutional, national, regional) or according to special subjects.
As the collection and selection of documents are decentralized tasks, a Guideline for the Selection of Documents is needed to orient the System Cooperating Centers. Common selection criteria are essential to guarantee the integrity, compatibility and the quality of the database records and also to maintain a balance between the extreme inflexibility and tolerance, avoiding consequently, both the inclusion of irrelevant documents and the exclusion of relevant ones.
LILACS Methodology allows the creation of national databases and also the feeding of the LILACS regional database. Each country of the System is responsible for deciding which documents have national and/or international values to be included in LILACS. Documents of local interest or which do not comply with LILACS criteria should be only included in the national databases.
The selection criteria of this Guide must be complemented, in practice, with experts’ consultation on the different areas covered by the database, and with the utilization of other components of the LILACS methodology such as the controlled vocabulary DeCS (Descriptors in Health Sciences), the Indexing Manual, etc.
The herein exposed selection principles do not probably solve all the questions that arise when a final decision is to be made. When doubts still persist after considering all the alternatives – including the experts’ advice – the indexer should favors the inclusion of the document.
As every component of the LILACS Methodology, this Guideline can be improved by observations and suggestions of all those who share the cooperative effort of feeding the LILACS database; this is the way to reach a high degree of optimization.
