PURPOSE:To present a review about a comparative study of bile duct ligation versus carbon tetrachloride Injection for inducing experimental liver cirrhosis. METHODS:This research was made through Medline/PubMed and SciELO web sites looking for papers on the content "induction of liver cirrhosis in rats". We have found 107 articles but only 30 were selected from 2004 to 2011. RESULTS:The most common methods used for inducing liver cirrhosis in the rat were administration of carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) and bile duct ligation (BDL). CCl4 has induced cirrhosis from 36 hours to 18 weeks after injection and BDL from seven days to four weeks after surgery. CONCLUSION:For a safer inducing cirrhosis method BDL is better than CCl4 because of the absence of toxicity for researches and shorter time for achieving it.