Guide
How to search the LILACS database in English
LILACS indexes Latin American and Caribbean health research that MEDLINE largely doesn't. Here's how to actually search it.
What LILACS is
LILACS (Literatura Latino-Americana e do Caribe em Ciências da Saúde) is the regional health sciences index maintained by BIREME/PAHO/WHO. It covers journals, theses, conference proceedings, and government reports from more than 25 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean — the large majority of which are never indexed in MEDLINE.
Records are predominantly in Portuguese and Spanish, with English abstracts on some but far from all entries. That language barrier, not availability, is the reason most reviewers skip it.
Searching it directly
LILACS is searchable through the Virtual Health Library (VHL / BVS) portal at pesquisa.bvsalud.org. Three things to know before you start:
- Use DeCS, not MeSH. LILACS is indexed with DeCS (Descritores em Ciências da Saúde), a trilingual thesaurus that maps onto MeSH but adds regionally relevant terms. A DeCS term entered in English will usually retrieve Portuguese- and Spanish-language records, because the thesaurus itself is trilingual.
- Free-text English terms retrieve much less. Searching dengue AND children as free text will miss records whose title and abstract are entirely in Portuguese. Pair every English free-text term with its Portuguese and Spanish equivalents, or rely on the controlled vocabulary.
- Field tags differ from PubMed. LILACS uses ti:, ab:, mh: (descriptor), and la: (language). Boolean operators must be uppercase.
A worked example
Say you want trials of dengue management in children. A reasonable LILACS strategy looks like:
(mh:"Dengue" OR ti:dengue OR ti:dengue) AND (mh:"Child" OR ti:crianças OR ti:niños OR ti:children)
Then filter by publication year and document type in the sidebar facets. Export is available as CSV or RIS from the results page, though the export caps out well below what a full systematic review search typically returns, so you may need to export in batches.
Why bother
The Cochrane Handbook (§4.3) explicitly recommends searching regional databases including LILACS to reduce geographic and language bias. For conditions with a heavy Latin American burden — dengue, Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, arboviral illness, snakebite envenoming, maternal health in low-resource settings — the regional literature is not a marginal supplement. It is frequently where the field trials were run.
Skipping it doesn't make a review neutral. It makes the review's evidence base geographically narrower than its conclusions imply.
Searching LILACS alongside everything else
Running LILACS as a separate manual step — different interface, different syntax, different export format, abstracts you can't read — is the reason it gets dropped from review protocols under deadline pressure.
Symmathy queries LILACS in parallel with PubMed, Europe PMC, Cochrane, ClinicalTrials.gov, J-STAGE, DOAJ, HAL, OpenAlex, CrossRef, ThaiJO, and KoreaMed from a single search box. Non-English titles and abstracts are translated inline, every record links back to its original LILACS entry, and the whole set exports to RIS, BibTeX, or CSV for your screening tool.
Symmathy does not score, rank, or recommend papers. It finds records and shows you where they came from — the appraisal is yours.