Abstract Introduction Throughout the years, several methods have been developed to help determine injury severity and obtain accurate prognoses in trauma patients. Trauma scores that have been used for more than 40 years are extremely useful in clinical practice as well as in research. Objective To conduct a review of the most relevant literature on trauma and to make a description of each of the scoring tools, focusing on their limitations and their application in clinical trials. Materials and methods Narrative review conducted in different databases such as PubMed, ScienceDirect and OVID. A manual search was also conducted of articles on the subject in both English and Spanish. Results The review articles provided an adequate description of each of the scores, the way they are calculated, the main limitations in their application, and the most relevant findings in the literature. Conclusion There is a wide range of severity scores used in trauma patients for anticipating clinically significant outcomes with varying degrees of accuracy. Creating and validating a single, universally valid score is a huge challenge; consequently, the selection of the scoring tool is based, to a large extent, on experience, the context and the available evidence.