ABSTRACT Increasing human dependence on engineering systems has recently made maintenance a higher priority. Thus, it becomes essential to study the many developments in this field, paying attention to some proposed models that do not appear to be effective in real applications. In this paper, we present a literature review on “maintenance effectiveness”, here defined as the level to which a maintenance policy fulfills its pre-defined objectives or optimizes general maintenance actions, hence improving the productive activities of an organization. Some insights into the research so far developed - such as the relationship between interest in studying maintenance effectiveness in a sector and the severity of catastrophic failures in that sector - and possible future trends - such as the focus on case studies rather than more theoretical papers - are presented. We also found that there are still gaps in the literature that, if explored, will open new routes in potentially promising directions.