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This article is a critical review of the most important publications containing regests, inventories and catalogues of documents relating to Silesia from the second half of the 19th century (Regesten zur schlesische Geschichte within the Codex diplomaticus Silesiae), through its post-war continuation (Silesian Regests), to catalogues and lists of documents in archives in Silesia published at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries and today. Such works have been influenced over the decades by current political and ideological trends. Above all – contrary to their titles – they ahistorically treated Silesia according to current (19th and 20th century) political and administrative divisions, rather than as a region with borders and divisions appropriate to the time of the documents’ creation. Sources concerning, for example, the Kingdom of Bohemia (Klodzko) or both Lusatia were included in the collection of Silesian documents. Moreover, documents for the eastern and north-western peripheries of Silesia were omitted. Particularly glaring is the fact that the State Archive in Zielona Góra, a city in Lower Silesia, was not included in most studies on Lower Silesia. These shortcomings affected scientific studies based on source publica tions, especially as when using them, one often skips reading the introductions and looks for a particular source in the index without checking whether it actually refers to Silesia. or not. Several examples of this were pointed out and highlighted the scarcity of the Bohemian-Moravian context, which had been ignored for decades among Wrocław researchers, leading to sometimes bizarre errors in the identification of people or places. Recent years have seen an overcoming of this dysfunction (notably the catalogue of documents in the Upper Silesian archives from 2004–2021). However, there are still works reproducing old patterns and errors (a correction of one such work is an appendix to the article).