Background: Publications are vital for the advancement of science because they disseminate new findings and stimulate interaction between researchers. In the last decades, the Brazilian government has financed initiatives to promote the country’s scientific production and its international dissemination. This has led to an improvement of the performance of Brazil in the international in the international ranking of scientific publications.

Objectives: To assess the contribution of Brazilian authors to the production of scientific reviews.

Methods: We performed a search for review articles published 2000–2010 in Web of Science, National Science Indicators, Scopus and GeoCapes. All those whose corresponding author was affiliated to a Brazilian institution were retrieved.

Results: The number of articles went from 12 434 in 2000 to 34 634 in 2010. The mean annual growth of Brazilian scientific publications was 10.7%, which is 5 times higher than the world average and Brazil is now the 13th country in the world in terms of annual scientific publications. The number of reviews went from 196 in 2000 to 1209 in 2010 and Brazil now holds the 15th place in the world in terms of review publications. The number of reviews grew 5 times more than that of original scientific articles. Almost all authors were from public universities. The director of the Brazilian Cochrane Centre (Atallah A) was second in the list of Brazilian authors with the largest number of reviews published and two research assistants of the Centre (Saconato H, Soares BGO) ranked 19th and 20th.

Conclusions: The number of Brazilian review publications has grown remarkably over the last decades. This growth is directly related to the number and quality of post-graduate courses and also to the dissemination of the culture of evidence-based health and the importance of systematic reviews in this context.