Artificial neural networks (ANN) have a relevant role nowadays; several areas apply this technique due to the advantages they have to solve complex problems with many constraints compared to traditional methods, which are becoming outdated. Very little is known about this technique and its application in different branches of Civil Engineering. For this reason, the present research aims to conduct a systematic review of the literature to identify the use of this technique and to determine the results of the application of ANN models in civil engineering. A total of 41 scientific articles were included, distributed as follows: 6 in Scopus, 1 in ScienceDirect, 23 in ProQuest, 7 in Google Scholar, 2 in DialNet, 2 in SciELO. It was found that ANNs are used to predict or forecast variables associated with the fields of study in civil engineering; 8 applications of ANN were found for concrete properties, 11 for soil properties, 5 for seismic analysis, 9 for hydraulics, 7 for real estate valuation and 1 for bridge design. Likewise, it was found that the multilayer Perceptron is the most used ANN model, achieving an average R2 of 0.99, which shows advantages to solve problems with precision, in shorter times, with missing data in the data sets, as well as the reduction of the error factor.