The use of the term documentary heritage, in a simplistic observation, seems obvious. However, the discussions around the documental heritage, lacks depth in information studies, since the employment reflects, directly, in a conceptual imprecision between the qualifier "documental". Therefore, an applied problem arises, since information units are based on concepts that can save or condemn to oblivion an item that is characterized as documental heritage. In view of this, the general objective of this research is to analyze the theoretical relations and applications of documentary heritage in the national scientific literature of Information Science. The study presents descriptive purposes, bibliographic means, bibliometric analysis and content analysis, as methods, in which 69 articles of Brazilian authors indexed from the Referential Database of Information Science Journal Articles in the period from 2010 to 2020 were surveyed. As results, it demonstrates six categories and 52 units of record that are present in the conceptual demarcation of the national documentary heritage, as well as the construction of indicators regarding the productivity of authors, institutions and journals. It highlights four emergent elements of characterization that present gaps in conceptualizations of documentary heritage and fifteen units of record used most frequently in publications. It considers that the documentary heritage comprises all collection of documents of extremely varied nature, belonging to any time and part of a set of manifestations and cultural representations, historical and contemporary, which is constituted of social memory, citizenship, identity, education and diversity of humanity, being of public or private ownership that includes spaces: social, innovative, identity, humanistic, cultural, scientific, historical, memorial, technological, through the link with the country of origin, in which carries attributes, substantially, informational.