The author undertakes a bibliographic review of academic publications between 1993 and 2010, after Atkinson’s review (1992), as part of his dissertation devoted to the study of shamanic practices in Spain. The starting point is a corpus of around seven thousand texts, although the analysis focuses on approximately one thousand texts, having been chosen the most relevant ones. This article gives an outline of some of the conclusions: firstly, the study of shamans and shamanism is determined by a double theoretical bias, epistemological and ontological; secondly, a theoretical radicalization underlies debates about the centrality of trance and the shaman; thirdly, the introduction of various terms to refer to shamans misleads the comprehension of shamanic practices. Finally, the author proposes three criteria to be applied in the anthropological study in order to distinguish shamans from pseudo-shamans on an individual basis. KEYWORDS: Shamanism, Bibliographical Review, Epistemology, Trance, Spirits