A major challenge in using recovery techniques, for the different natural ecosystems affected by mining, is a mutual relationship between the habitat and its biota response. This study aimed to do a review to identify the number of publications, which countries are publishing more and which recovery techniques and taxonomic group are used in mining areas globally have contributed to the maintenance or recovery of the environment. We reviewed the literature on recovery in mining areas worldwide, between 1994 and 2016, using the Web of Science online database. We identified 9,000 publications, after the selection procedures, we analyzed the 467 remaining manuscripts. Of these, 34.26% were published between 1994 and 2004, and 65.74% between 2006 and 2016. The countries that contributed the most were the USA with 16.45%, Australia with 13.56% and China with 8.66%. Brazil contributed 6.9% of the publications. The recovery techniques using vegetation were the most reported in the literature and most used. The taxonomic group of terrestrial plants was the most cited and most used in the recovery of degraded areas. We found various techniques for recovering degraded areas can be established, but most of them did not show proper monitoring and without this the recovery processes may not achieve their objectives and studies that test the effect size of these recovery methods are still necessary.