An exhaustive review of the literature about the vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) of hydrogen-hydrocarbon (H-2-HC) systems is reported in this work, including studies where reactor modeling is considered or not. Hydrocarbons can be pure compounds or petroleum fractions. Reported petroleum fractions are from gasoline to vacuum residue. The analyzed information was: type of device or cell used to obtain experimental data, model used to predict the VLE behavior, and different options to adjust the EOS by interaction parameters of H-2-HC. Comparisons of the ranges of operating conditions (pressure and temperature) of VLE studies with or without reaction were done. The variations of the distribution coefficients of H-2 on HC were compared with respect to the pressure. Several of the studies show a strategy used to characterize the oil fraction. It is recognized the importance to consider VLE in the reactor modeling, because it affects the calculation of conversion, depending on the properties of the feedstock and operating conditions. For future work it is recommended to obtain VLE data for H-2-heavy petroleum fractions, to development appropriate experimental methods to determine the physical properties of pseudocomponents from heavy petroleum fraction, or mathematical techniques to overcome this deficiency. In addition, the use of analysis of phases' stability in the VLE is suggested to be sure about the number of phases present in the system to obtain more reliable H-2-pseudocomponents interaction parameters. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.