Although the application of agro-industrial effluents on soil is an important practice of environmental management in the industry, this practice can cause impacts on soil microbiology due to the nutrient load and other components present in this waste. Thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate and select relevant articles, involving studies of factors that may influence the amount of biomass in the soil, comparing methodology and progress in studies with this theme. For this, articles indexed in three electronic databases were used: Web of Science, Scopus and Scielo. From these databases, 18 articles related to the topic were selected, all published between 2005 and 2018. For the total of selected scientific studies, 11 have methodologies related to the scope of the study and 7 reinforce the theoretical basis in the elaboration and complementation of the study. It was observed that the main articles were published in the English language, mainly in studies related to the Scopus and Web of Science bases and the most recurrent methods were titrimetric and spectrophotogrammetric methods. It is also concluded that the majority of the studies analyzed relate to microbial biomass alteration of the soil under influence of effluent disposal, as well as a variation of these communities as a function of soil cover.