LILACS includes documents of Latin American and Caribbean authors and/or published in the countries of the Region, and those produced by PAHO Programmers and Special Centers.

Documents on Latin America published out of the region will not be included because most of them are already included in international databases.

According to one of the BVS guidelines most of the existing international databases will be carefully searched to identify documents produced by Latin American and Caribbean and published out of the Region as well as documents on Latin American and the Caribbean produced by authors outside our Region and indexed in international databases.

Documents representing the scientific production of the countries in the Region should be included in the database whenever their contents have national and/or international relevance and have also a special significance.

Documents which interest is limited to a country or to a region within a country can only be included in the national or institutional database managed by the Cooperating Centers. These documents, although processed in accordance with the LILACS Methodology, will not be transferred to its database.