Introduction:

This literature review collected scientific papers about violent deaths in Argentina, published between 2001 and 2016. The objectives are to describe the topics, fields of knowledge, disciplines, and methodologies of the papers and analyze the extent in which the academic production captures, interprets, and/or establishes violence as a public health problem.

Materials and Methods:

A total of 72 digital-format papers from scientific journal indexed in BVS, PubMed, Redalyc, SciELO, and Scopus were collected. A quantitative and qualitative strategy was developed, following the Critical Interpretive Synthesis framework.

Results:

The review indicated that the literature (a) is predominantly focused on physical violence, (b) is mainly produced by the Medical Sciences, (c) has descriptive objectives, (d) is characterized by having national and institutional geographical scopes, (e) uses primary data to study empirically the phenomena, and (f) mainly employs quantitative analysis methodologies. Most of the papers studied suicide, and the ones that analyzed homicide usually neglected to study the perpetrators' perspective. These aspects structurally describe the literature, yet distinctive thematic subfields were found, with heterogeneous features. The use of national statistics is scarce to indicate the epidemiological relevance of violence.

Conclusion:

The frequent recurrence of definitions and taxonomies of international organizations (mainly, World Health Organization) in the definition of health and violence indicates the dominant discursive position of these organizations in certain fields of knowledge.

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