The first studies of diatoms and river pollution were carried out 60 years ago, and the suitability of these micro-algae as bioassessment indicators for monitoring river quality was quickly demonstrated. The objective of this review is to describe the state of the art of the study of diatoms and river pollution between 1999 and 2009. The objective was to group the publications homogeneously according to subject and to indicate which subjects never overlap. To this end a lexical analysis was conducted on the abstract structure of these publications and seven K-means clusters were defined.