Literature survey
The final number of articles was 159, representing 195 studies, covering
211 sites. The northern and southernmost sampling locations were
Oiapoque (latitude: 4° N) and Chuí (latitude: 34° S), respectively,
spreading across ~7,000 km, representing nearly the
entire Brazilian coast. Articles comprised of only one study represented
80% of the total, followed by articles composed by two (11%), three
(6%), and four (2%) studies. Only one article presented 6 studies of
which only 3 were used based on the second-level filtering criteria
listed above (Nunes, Norris, & Knowlton, 2011). The oldest articles
were published in 1991 (two articles) and the newest in 2019 (12
articles). Since 1991 the number of publications per year increased,
particularly after the year 2001 (four articles/year) when a steady
increase is noticed, culminating in the publication of at least 10
articles per year after 2014 (Fig. 2). The five journals with the
highest number of articles were listed in Table 1.