Abstract

A corpus of 60 articles published in Spanish, English, and Portuguese was analyzed to account for the integrative literature review on the concept of vulnerability from bioethics, identifying the following thematic trends: risk, susceptibility, autonomy, and culture in people and communities. The methodological approach has been mainly qualitative. We found that the disciplines that most addressed the concept belong to the human and social sciences. The authors recommend conducting studies of the concept from people’s perspectives and that ethics committees review the informed consent and information guides according to these results. The categories give way to the concept of vulnerability, which must be analyzed beyond principlism in bioethics.