Introduction: Searching non-Anglophone databases identifies trials from journals not in sources such as MEDLINE. LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature) is a general health care database produced by the Pan American Health Organization. Although the abstracts of reports are mostly in Portuguese or Spanish, the titles are frequently translated into English and the reports are indexed in Portuguese or Spanish and English.

Objective: To identify all randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and controlled clinical trials (CCTs) in LILACS.

Methods: LILACS was searched with frequently used English phrases, their Portuguese/Spanish equivalent and some unique phrases to each language. Large randomly selected samples of the results of these searches were then inspected independently by an English speaker (CA) and by someone fluent in Portuguese, Spanish and English (KS).

Results: Overall 2093 reports were identified by all languages used in combination. 46% (963) of these were RCTs/CCTs. English phrases alone find 70% of these reports and 57% of this sub-sample were RCTs/CCTs. Portuguese/Spanish phrases found 72% of the total and again 57% of these were RCTs/CCTs. Monolingual English speakers searching the printed off reports were 83% sensitive and 90% specific for RCTs/CCTs.

Discussion: LILACS contains many trials not indexed by other databases. Although, being a multilingual searcher has the advantage of a more comprehensive identification of trials in this database, an English speaker can identify a high percentual of the trials with adequate degrees of sensitivity and specificity.