Only historical accounts are included, i.e., secondary literature is listed, not the primary reports of scientific or technical research. Historical assessments of Canadian medicine are excluded except where there is clear evidence that a publication concerns scientific matters, such as anatomy and physiology. A work is included on the basis of subject content not authorship, and may have been published in Canada or abroad. The subject scope is broad and is best illustrated by the subject classification developed for the project. Publications in any language are included.
Most publications are in English, with the next largest group in French.
Both monographs and periodical articles are included. Records for relevant individual essays in a collection are created as well as a record for the collection as a whole.