BACKGROUND:?Iatrogenic bile duct injury continues to be an important clinical problem, resulting in serious morbidity, and occasional mortality, to patients. The ease of management, operative risk, and outcome of bile duct injuries vary considerably, and are highly dependent on the type of injury and its location. This article reviews the various classiifcation systems of bile duct injury. DATA?SOURCES:?A Medline, PubMed database search was performed to identify relevant articles using the keywords"bile duct injury", "cholecystectomy", and “classiifcation”. Additional papers were identiifed by a manual search of the references from the key articles. RESULTS:?Traditionally, biliary injuries have been classiifed using the Bismuths classiifcation. This classiifcation, which originated from the era of open surgery, is intended to help the surgeons to choose the appropriate technique for the repair, and it has a good correlation with the ifnal outcome after surgical repair. However, the Bismuths classiifcation does not encompass the whole spectrum of injuries that are possible. Bile duct injury during laparoscopic cholecystectomy tends to be more severe than those with open cholecystectomy. Strasberg’s classiifcation made Bismuth’s classiifcation much more comprehensive by including various other types of extrahepatic bile duct injuries. Our group, Bergman et al, Neuhaus et al, Csendes et al, and Stewart et al have also proposed other classiifcation systems to complement the Bismuths classiifcation. CONCLUSIONS:None of the classiifcation system is universally accepted as each has its own limitation. Hopefully, a universally accepted comprehensive classiifcation system will be published in the near future.