Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are currently applied in the evaluation of different eventualities that risk population health or have a great expansion in the territory, as is the case of oil spills. This review aims to study the application of GIS in oil spills from the analysis of research articles. The PRISMA methodology and eligibility criteria were applied, which consisted of the periodicity of the publication, language, IMRD structure, accessibility and research topic. Finding a total of 52 articles, it was determined that the most sensitive areas are marine (High Seas), coastal (beaches, dunes and bays), tropical and rivers. Likewise, the causes of spills were the collision of ships and the rupture of pipes. In the same way, the most applied GIS software was identified, these being ArcGIS (38.5%), Google Earth (5.8%), QGIS (3.8%), SNAP (7.7), among others. It is worth mentioning that the data was validated using statistical analyzes and in situ data. It was concluded that the occurrence of spills in marine and terrestrial areas, are mostly caused by the transport and the state of hydrocarbon pipelines, identifying itself as the main program applied to ArcGIS and validating the results with different techniques depending on the article.