Despite the fact that the social sciences are often associated with a research agenda that mainly focuses on terrestrial worlds (Hannigan, 2017), ocean-human relations are not a new realm in the field. Social scientists have dealt with fisheries, fishing, and coastal communities for decades. One of these early attempts was a publication by sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, sometimes called the father of maritime sociology (Tönnies, 2010), about the social situation of dockworkers and seamen in seaports. Another endeavor is anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s Pacific island studies titled “Argonauts of Western Pacific” on the religious and long-distance Melanesian Kula published in 1922. These are just two studies among many more in various other social science disciplines.

While having its roots in the study of fisheries, the field of marine social sciences has evolved over time to encompass a wider range of disciplines, topics, and approaches (Urquhart et al., 2014; Arbo et al., 2018). In addition to sociology and anthropology, the disciplines of geography, political science, economics, history, and psychology all impart insights into the marine social science field. More “applied science” disciplines, such as education, communication studies, development studies, and law, also contribute to the marine social sciences (Bennett, 2019). The methods are as diverse as the disciplines, ranging from quantitative and qualitative to participatory (ibid.) and from theoretical to applied research (McKinley et al., 2022).

Against the backdrop of ever-growing anthropogenic pressures on marine and coastal ecosystems (Longo and Clark, 2016; Jouffray et al., 2020), the interwovenness of oceans and societies is now clearer than ever. Such anthropogenic pressures can be direct (e.g. fishing, sea-use change, and climate change) and indirect (human population growth, per capita income, and technological advances). These anthropogenic drivers not only threaten the health of marine and coastal ecosystems (Moullec et al., 2021; Setter et al., 2022), but also put at risk the people who depend on oceans for food, recreation, transport, and commerce, underscoring the vital role in sustaining livelihoods. To add to the situation, previous findings underestimated the effects of anthropogenic pressures on ocean health (Hermes et al., 2022) and the pressures are likely to intensify in the future (Halpern et al., 2019; Moullec et al., 2021).

Considering the anthropogenic influence on the world’s oceans and the role of oceans in human wellbeing, the urgency for societal knowledge related to marine and coastal ecosystems can no longer be ignored. It comes as no surprise that the call for societal knowledge related to marine and coastal ecosystems among the research community (e.g. Bennett, 2019, p. 246) and international agendas (e.g. UN Ocean Decade) has recently grown more strident. In this vein, the marine social sciences, dealing with ocean-human relations, are considered a major beacon of hope for providing such knowledge for a sustainable future of marine and coastal ecosystems (McKinley et al., 2019). Now is a crucial moment to strengthen the role of marine social sciences and contribute to “the science we need for the ocean we want”, the UN Ocean Decade’s vision (Bennett, 2019). Supplementary Material 1 reflects on anticipated outcomes that mirror the “ocean we want”. As the UN Ocean Decade “is concerned with data and information, as much as it is with human values and wellbeing in protecting the oceans” (Franke et al., 2022), Bennett’s hope might not be too far-fetched.

On that premise, the marine social scientist community as well as marine natural scientists call for the inclusion of the marine social sciences in the wider marine science field (Martin, 2019; Moon et al., 2021). At the same time marine social scientists urge that marine social sciences’ “identity as a valuable and valid discipline in its own right” should be ensured and strengthened (McKinley et al., 2020, p. 87).

The marine social sciences have gained significant attention in recent years, with several studies accentuating its contribution to sustainability. In some of the first marine social science overviews, Arbo and colleagues (2018) identified five topics related to blue growth that marine social scientists should critically engage with, including governance frameworks and knowledge production. Bennett (2019) highlighted four pillars to which the marine social sciences can contribute valuable perspectives, such as examining the effectiveness of governance and management approaches and gauging the effects of conservation and management interventions on human wellbeing.

The first manifesto for the marine social sciences, gaining extensive reach, was developed during the MARE 2019 conference, with urgent topics, suggestions for governance research, and new methodologies and approaches (Bavinck and Verrips, 2020) that were discussed intensively in 12 comments from the marine social sciences community. In line with the manifesto, McKinley and colleagues (2020) drew on qualitative analysis of this conference’s discussions to indicate priorities for the ongoing development of the marine social science community, such as developing an interdisciplinary research agenda. In contrast, McKinley and colleagues (2022) later conducted a survey to emphasize future marine social sciences priorities, including marine and coastal governance and management, fisheries and fishing communities, and adaptation and climate change. The study also identified challenges and barriers, such as the lack of visibility and recognition of the marine social sciences. The role of the social sciences to provide fresh thinking and interdisciplinary research that enables societal transformations toward sustainability and an “ocean we need for the future we want” (Bleischwitz et al., 2022) was also recently re-emphasized.

These works demonstrate the growing importance of the marine social sciences in promoting sustainability in marine and coastal ecosystems.

The metadata for this analysis was obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) database. We used Boolean operators ² to search for sustainability-related marine social sciences peer-reviewed articles. For the sake of retrieving metadata for our analysis, the search term, displayed in Figure 1 , was applied using the topic search (TS) in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) WoS Core Collection. To obtain an approximate solution for the reflection of the research field using such a comprehensive database is important. Additionally, using broad search terms to account for the diversification of marine social sciences research (Urquhart et al., 2014; Arbo et al., 2018) was crucial for our analysis. As mirrored in our search term, studies were included in our analysis if they (1) had a focus on ocean or coastal ecosystems; (2) included ocean-human relationships; (3) were situated within social sciences disciplines; and (4) were framed in sustainability-related ³ discourses. The term “socio-ecological” was applied in our search term to account for processes such as socio-ecological change and socio-ecological transformation and at the same time for considering the relationship between society and oceanic ecosystems. Although this term is not necessarily intertwined with sustainability issues, we checked the use in our database, in which it appears to be highly connected to the notion of sustainability.

Despite WoS covering a broad range of journals, it is worth noting that no single database can cover all relevant journals in a field. Hence, a few journals in the field, such as Maritime Studies are not covered in our data. Additionally, while we did not limit our search to English articles, it is possible that articles written in other languages may be underrepresented in the WoS database, as Pranckutė (2021) as well as Mongeon and Paul-Hus (2015) reported. This could have affected the representation of non-English language articles in our study. We decided not to filter the search results by year, since older articles (the first one appeared in 1991) might be potentially valuable to trace back the intellectual foundations of marine social science research. The initial sample consisted of 1,240 articles which were extracted on November 30, 2022.

While the metadata of an article has informed the analyses of the scientific production and the contribution of journals, countries and institutions, the baseline for the keyword and network analyses of our study was keyword co-occurrence. We decided to merge keywords chosen by authors (author keywords) and indexed terms that are automatically generated from the titles of cited articles (keywords plus) to get a comprehensive idea of the content of the articles in our database.

Author keywords represent carefully selected topic-specific words that authors use to describe their articles’ issues (Lu et al., 2020). These keywords are typically chosen to offer a general understanding of an article’s topics under investigation. Because author keywords can impact publication success, attract potential readers, and determine dissemination to particular fields, authors tend to use informative, relevant, and refined words with a standardized academic expression as their keywords (Uddin and Khan, 2016). As significant entities of metadata, author keywords play a vital role in bibliographic analysis, helping to clarify scientific knowledge structures, identify subject hotspots, and detect research trends (Lu et al., 2020). Zhang and colleagues (2015) show that keywords plus might offer a broader description of an article’s content, while being as effective as author keywords to conduct bibliometric analysis. Merging author keywords and keywords plus therefore seems promising if the goal is to get a complete set of units of analysis.

After merging author keywords and keywords plus, a list of keyword synonyms was created using the software KHCoder and Excel. Words with similar meanings were summarized under one concept using the Excel output of the KHCoder frequency distribution list of keywords. Considering synonyms is important to account for the fact that authors often use different keywords or abbreviations to describe the same research topic (e.g. “MPA,” “marine protected areas,” “marine protected area”). Each “concept” therefore contains synonym keywords for the same underlying construct. An example of a concept would be “marine protected areas” for the synonyms listed in the parenthesis above.

The abstracts of all articles that showed up in our initial sample, which were assigned exclusively on the basis of keywords listed in keywords plus, were manually screened. Articles that were mistakenly placed in our database were manually eliminated, whereafter 1,215 articles remained for analysis. Those articles contained 3,698 keywords with 21,994 mentions.

Aiming to include only the most representative concepts in the analysis, we only considered concepts mentioned at least 25 times. Eliminating stopwords was an important step in preprocessing the data. Stopwords are words that are considered irrelevant because they appeared in our search term and could therefore yield trivial results (Block and Fisch, 2020, p. 311). Hence, 144 keywords representing 44.43% of all mentions were included in the final sample for further analysis.

On the basis of the final sample, a binary keyword occurrence matrix was created with KHCoder, providing an overview of the occurrence of the chosen 144 keywords in the merged keywords of the 1,215 identified articles. The binary keyword occurrence matrix was analyzed with the software UCINET 6.636 (Borgatti et al., 2002). First, a keyword co-occurrence matrix was created, displaying the number of co-occurrences of each keyword of the final sample. A core-periphery analysis of the keyword co-occurrence matrix revealed keywords central to the research field, with a strong connection to each other (Borgatti and Everett, 2000).

To identify different research streams, factor analysis was conducted with IBM SPSS Statistics 28 (IBM Corp, 2021). By grouping the keywords, based on the co-occurrence frequency, into factors, factor analysis identifies keywords that represent a shared research stream (Kuntner and Teichert, 2016). The factor loadings display the representativeness of keywords for a research stream (Wörfel, 2021; Sun and Teichert, 2022). We used a principal component analysis and a Varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization to extract the research streams. The software Gephi (version 0.10.1) was used to visualize the research (Bastian et al., 2009). To provide a more detailed picture of the research network, density scores were calculated using UCINET software. This method involves dividing the number of existing ties between nodes (keywords) by the sum of all possible ties, as described by Hanneman and Riddle (2005). For a dichotomized network matrix, a density score of one indicates that all keywords are connected, whereas a density score of zero means that the keywords are not connected to each other (Zuschke, 2020).

As displayed in Table 1 , a total of 1,215 relevant articles in the sustainability-related marine social sciences is published in 312 sources. The first article in the sustainability-related marine social sciences field appeared in 1991. This appearance may be linked to Agenda 21, a comprehensive plan of action to build a global partnership for sustainable development to improve human lives and protect the environment that was established in June 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Agenda 21 includes a dedicated chapter on the conservation and sustainable use of oceans, seas, and coastal areas (Chapter 17).

The annual growth rate for the years 1991 to 2023 reaches 2,19% ( Table 1 ), with its peak and a total number of 184 published articles in 2021 ( Figure 2 ). The average age of documents in our database illustrates that the (sustainability-related) marine social sciences is a young and emerging field, as some scholars stated (McKinley et al., 2022).

As illustrated in Figure 2 , the total number of articles as a proxy for productivity (Donthu et al., 2021) steadily increased over time. The exponential growth in marine social science research (McKinley et al., 2020; Jefferson et al., 2021) also proves to be true for sustainability-related articles in the field. This growth is reflected in the curve in Figure 2 . The scientific production acquired additional momentum in 2015. It is possible that significant developments in multilateralism and international policymaking in 2015 contributed to the sharp growth of article numbers from that year onward. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), specifically SDG 14 dedicated to the oceans, seas and marine resources (life below water), and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change are two major agreements among several others that were set in motion in 2015. In addition, the Assembly of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission started discussing concepts and the potential benefits of a UN Ocean Decade in 2016/2017. Finally, December 5, 2017 marks the date when the UN General Assembly decided to establish the UN Ocean Decade for 2021 to 2030.

Whereas research concerning the Covid-19 pandemic was boosted from 2020, qualitative empirical research was “seriously hampered” due to regulations and restrictions (Otto and Haase, 2022). With this in mind, the drop in article publications since 2020 perhaps indicates that marine social science research is often empirically grounded research and involves “being out there” in the field, pointing to what Bavinck and Verrips called “marine empiricism” (2020, p. 123).

Table 2 depicts the ten most relevant sources in our database as expressed by the number of publications between 1991-2023. The 1215 articles in our study were published in 312 journals. Among the sustainability-related marine social science sources are Marine Policy (132), Sustainability (121), and Ocean & Coastal Management (79). Given that our data collection encompasses 1,215 articles and the number of articles published in the most relevant journals appears to be relatively limited, it suggests that the field is fragmented in terms of where articles are published. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that many of the most relevant journals in the field are inter- and transdisciplinary. Only two journals, Marine Policy and Frontiers in Marine Science, are dominated by either social or natural scientists. The desire of the marine social science community to integrate into wider marine science, as described in Section 2, may be reflected by the high number of interdisciplinary journals in our database. The journal landscape in our data points to the development toward the integration of social and natural research, that the manifesto for the marine social sciences wishes to see (Bavinck and Verrips, 2020).

A total of 71 countries ⁴ have contributed to publishing about sustainability-related marine social science. The USA is the most active country in the field, leading with the highest proportion of publications (n=198; 16,3%), followed by China (n=151; 12,4%) and the United Kingdom (n=112; 9,2%). The absence of certain countries with vibrant marine social science communities from Figure 3 , such as Poland (Kołodziej and Kołodziej-Durnaś, 2022) and the Netherlands, being the home of the Center for Maritime Research (MARE), could have several explanations. This absence could potentially be attributed to variations in publication cultures and practices across different countries. Another explanation could be the absence of the Maritime Studies journal from our database. In light of the 10 top publishing countries, displayed in Figure 3 , it altogether seems appropriate to criticize the marine (social) sciences field for being dominated by “Western” countries (Ahmadia et al., 2021; Shellock et al., 2022).

Of the total publications, 57% were single-country publications (SCP) and a smaller proportion (43%) were multiple-country publications (MCP). MCP are created by authors affiliated with institutions from different countries, pointing to existing international cooperation. Considering the cross-border nature of oceanic matters, these numbers indicate that there might be a lot of potential in terms of joint international efforts. Such a global effort, as Bennett argues, could also contribute to building a “community of practice and catalyze insights from marine social sciences to guide marine and coastal policy (2019, p. 250)”.

We identified institutions that have been most productive and influential in sustainability-related marine social sciences over the course of time, focusing on three time slices (1998-2010, 2011-2016, and 2017-2022). Those three time slices were selected to account for the expansion of the research field between 2017 and 2022 (i.e. number of publications 1998 – 2010: 100; number of publications in 2017 alone: 96) ( Supplementary Material 2 ). Generally, a strong relationship can be seen among regions and institutions. From 1998 to 2010, Anglo-American institutes dominated sustainability-related marine social sciences with a commitment to publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Still, even the most productive institutes had a limited number of publications, correlating with the low scientific production during that period.

From 2011 to 2016, a diversification of productive institutes can be observed, with more European universities entering the field. This trend intensified from 2017 to 2022. A surprising finding is the absence of Chinese institutes, as the country is the second most productive in terms of article output. This might show that marine social science research is dispersed across many institutes in China.

At the same time, institutions from Portugal and the Netherlands appeared among the list of most productive and influential institutions ( Supplementary Material 2 ), hinting at a concentration of sustainability-related marine social sciences in very influential institutions. Altogether, the sustainability-related marine social sciences field attracts more and more researchers from various institutes in the world, which could explain the rapid growth in recent years.

In our analysis, word frequencies of concepts were used as a descriptive tool to get a preliminary understanding of relevant themes in the sustainability-related marine social sciences. The more frequently the concepts were mentioned in the articles, the larger their size in Figure 4 . The most used concepts are “conservation”(n=338) “climate change”(n=281), “fisheries”(n=279), “impact”(n=271) and “system”(n=215), pointing to popular themes in our data. In terms of the spatial component, “community”(n=126) and “islands”(n=106) appear as prominent concepts. A speculative explanation of the high frequency of such concepts is that sustainability-related marine social sciences focus on small regions or social microstructures. A comprehensive overview of the concept’s frequencies is displayed in Supplementary Material 3 . Section 4.8 in this study is dedicated to the detailed explanation of how the keywords relate and which research stream they form.

To study the evolution of concepts, we analyzed several features. We focused on the last ten years (2012-2022), since publication output encompassed at least two publications with every concept in each of those years. The frequency of certain keywords over a specific period reveals the evolution of sustainability-related marine social science studies and brings to light recent research trends. Figure 5 and Supplementary Material 4 display how the 10 most popular concepts evolved overtime. In addition, Supplementary Material 5 reveals other detail,such as when certain concepts began to appear in our data or howlong the relevant concepts’ burst status lasts.

Figure 5 displays the five most popular concepts in the decadebetween 2012 and 2022. The point where the curve peaks on Figure 5 ’s y-axis represents when conceptswere mentioned the most. Due to limited space, we focus on illustrating the temporal evolution of an exemplary concept. The concept “conservation” (dark blue) is one of the most prominent topics, as the word cloud (Figure 4) displayed. “Conservation” shows an overall increase from 2012 to 2020, with some upward and downward trends. There are two sharp increases in keyword usage ─ the first one between 2012 and 2013 and the second one from 2018 to 2020.

The first incline could potentially reflect debates on international conservation goals, which intensified from 2010 onwards. The Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010 (CBD) (United Nations, 1992) introduced Aichi Target 11 to encourage countries to preserve coastal and marine areas using protected areas and other effective conservation tools, with the goal of conserving a minimum of 10% of such regions by 2020 (UNEP, 2010). This goal gained further support in 2012 at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), the year that reported a sharp increase in the keyword usage of “conservation.”

The second incline and the highest usage of “conservation” in 2019 might be linked to 2020 being the target year for which parties agreed to conserve 10% of marine and coastal areas under both the CBD (United Nations, 1992) and the SDGs.

Up to this stage, our results offered a general overview of sustainability-related marine social sciences output regarding article number developments, dominant journals, institutions, and countries as well as regular themes and their evolution. This subsection provides insights into how specific topics in the field have been discussed and which research streams those topics form.

Our analysis revealed six factors through a principal component factor analysis. The factors explain 62.86% of the total variance in our dataset.

We qualitatively analyzed articles to determine each stream’s key attributes. Articles with a high number of keywords allocated to an attributed factor served as references to describe the stream’s research paradigm, theoretical background, and popular methods. In view of the focus on the top representative articles, the intention is not to provide a complete recap of the research streams. Instead, we provide a description of the research streams in an illustrative manner. Supplementary Material 6 contains an overview of each research stream’s top ten keywords and most representative articles, including information on the applied research methodologies. As the identified research streams vary regarding article numbers, the following descriptions also vary in length.

The network illustration ( Figure 6 ) depicts how keywords and research streams are related to each other. The number of co-occurrences as a proxy for keyword prevalence is reflected in the size of a node, while a co-occurrence is represented by a tie between keywords. The positioning of nodes in the network is based on the connections between nodes (Jacomy et al., 2014). Consequently, keywords in the core of the network have a stronger connection to keywords of their own research stream, as well as to other research streams. The network consists of three larger research streams (perceptions and benefits of marine conservation; fisheries, aquaculture, and food security; and climate change and climate change responses) and three smaller subordinate research streams (coastal and marine management; coastal land use change; and development and ocean-human health). Density scores provide additional information on the knowledge exchange in and between research streams. High scores indicate extensive knowledge sharing, while low scores hint at little intellectual connection (Kuntner and Teichert, 2016). The intellectual connection is reflected in the use of similar concepts in the articles’ respective keywords.

Overall, all research streams display a medium to high knowledge exchange in the network, with values ranging from 0.83 and 0.95 in research streams and values from 0.59 to 0.81 between streams ( Supplementary Material 7 ). The strongest within-knowledge exchange was found in the coastal land use change research stream. Despite a high interconnectedness with the climate change and climate change responses research stream, it also exhibited the lowest interconnectedness, i.e. with the fisheries, aquaculture, and food security research stream. Apparent from the network illustration as well as the density scores, the coastal and marine management research stream acts as a cohesive element of the whole research field.

Our results identified a diversification of aspects of sustainability-related marine social science research over time. Varying countries and institutes involved in publishing in the field, as well as diverse research topics, echoed by increased keywords in recent years, are among such aspects. Despite a perception of marine social scientists as being a mere helping hand to natural scientists (McKinley et al., 2022), the identified research streams indicate a broad expertise in its own right.

This expertise of sustainability-related marine social sciences is also illustrated in the research streams’ contributions to the UN Ocean Decade and its various anticipated outcomes. For instance, stakeholder participation and its positive effects are discussed throughout various research streams. In providing knowledge about stakeholder participation processes, sustainability-related marine social science research could help prevent scientific findings about coastal and marine ecosystems entering society as “fixed truth” (Bogusz and Holtappels, 2021, p. 279). It can furthermore help pave the way to UN Ocean Decade’s Outcome 7 ─ “[an] inspiring and engaging ocean where society understands and values the ocean in relation to human wellbeing and sustainable development” (UNESCO-IOC, 2021, highlights in original).

Despite its vast contributions to possible sustainable pathways, scholars argue that there remains a lack of “visibility and recognition” of marine social sciences in and outside academia (McKinley et al., 2022). This is also reflected in the fact that social scientists represent a minority among international environmental expert organizations. To foster the outreach of (sustainability-related) marine social sciences, developing more extensive research on questions of how to strengthen the visibility of social scientists’ value in shaping sustainable futures of coastal and marine ecosystems may be crucial. In addition, it could be important to explore how to better enroll social scientists into expert organizations.

Our results indicated an unbalanced approach to knowledge production in terms of spatial distribution. While case studies are conducted worldwide, recognizing regional focus areas in some research streams, the vast majority of peer-reviewed articles are written by researchers based at institutes in the Global North. This discrepancy is particularly concerning given the location of several significant marine ecosystems in the Global South. As Partelow and colleagues (2020) noted in their literature review, scientists from such regions are not at the forefront of knowledge production. This disparity could potentially contribute to the “intellectual dominance” of the Global North, as scholars like Chakrabarty (2000) have argued. This trend echoes concerns about the risks associated with “parachute science” (Stefanoudis et al., 2021) and it may result in a less suitable viewpoint and further strengthen one-sided dependencies in the knowledge production about marine ecosystems (Partelow et al., 2020). Borrowing from Hornidge and colleagues (2023), an important question for the future would be: How can “eye-level science systems with valued contributions built on robust cooperative networks within and between Global North and Global South science systems” (p. 31) be enhanced?

Our study demonstrates that single-country case studies are among the most prominent research methods in some research streams of the sustainability-related marine social sciences. Such case studies highlight the contribution of sustainability-related marine social sciences in understanding the complexity of transformation processes in different regions and could enhance “local and regional ocean knowledge systems,” as the UN Ocean Decade proposes (Hornidge et al., 2023, p. 28). Yet, marine ecosystems are often summarized under the term “world ocean” (in the singular) for a reason, which is to present the cross-border character of oceanic concerns. Facing the global ocean crisis, putting such knowledge systems into dialogue appears to be equally important (ibid.).

A point of departure to enhance such a dialogue could be the development of cross-country studies or reviews that draw on country comparisons in the marine social science realm. Such studies could foster the understanding of marine ecosystems and solutions to the climate and biodiversity crisis on a global level. In addition, cross-country studies could promote author collaborations worldwide, where we found some room for improvement regarding multiple country publications.

The value of scientific collaboration is not only revealed by the UN Ocean Decade and under Article 242 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) but was recently reaffirmed by the approval of the UN High Seas Treaty on March 4, 2023. The treaty aims to safeguard the diversity of marine biodiversity and exercise supervision over the open ocean at a global level. In such an endeavor, “research capacity building among nations” plays a pivotal role (Jones, 2023). The extensive expertise in the “perceptions and benefits of marine conservation” as well as the “fisheries, aquaculture, and food security” research streams could be a point of departure to build on regarding questions on offshore conservation in the light of the UN High Seas Treaty.

Our study has identified the diverse ways in which the marine social sciences provide knowledge to support the sustainability of marine and coastal ecosystems, as well as the livelihoods of people who rely on them. Notably, our analysis of the journal landscape suggests that there is a growing trend toward integrating social and natural sciences research, which is in line with the goals of the marine social sciences manifesto (Bavinck and Verrips, 2020). This trend is evident in interdisciplinary and marine science journals that regularly publish sustainability-related marine social science studies. Such developments indicate that there is substantial potential for knowledge exchange between these disciplines.

There is however still a need to facilitate the integration of natural and social sciences knowledge to better understand ocean-human relations, in line with the UN Ocean Decade (UNESCO-IOC, 2021). It is essential to explore ways to bring natural and social scientists who are working on coastal and marine ecosystems into dialogue, as Bogusz and Holtappels (2021) stressed. To identify research topics for collaboration more precisely, it may be useful to conduct a more detailed study of the contributions of different disciplines to specific research topics. In addition, exploring the challenges of bringing natural and social scientists together could provide insights into important levers for interdisciplinary cooperation. While McKinley and colleagues (2022) have made a promising start in identifying such challenges and barriers, more research is needed to advance this important agenda. Furthermore, funding mechanisms that promote persistent interdisciplinary networks and projects are much needed.

The decline in article publications since 2020 is associated with Covid-19 restrictions and marine social sciences’ focus on empirical work. Paired with the lack of theoretical contributions in some research streams, this might point to potential for situating and framing where marine social sciences stand in terms of theoretical approaches. Consequently, Bavinck and Verrips urgeded to develop “social science theory based on coastal, marine empiricism from all over the world” (2020, p. 123).

While our analysis provided insights into research topics, methodological and theoretical approaches, it remained elusive in terms of providing more detail about disciplinary approaches and regional variances of approaching ocean-human relations. Because “how we know the ocean varies substantially around the world” (Hornidge et al., 2023), future bibliometric analysis could focus on such aspects and provide additional insights as well as a more nuanced understanding of the regional and disciplinary variances of approaching marine and coastal ecosystems. Studies about the epistemic diversity of marine social sciences could also help to avoid the regular misconceptions in the field (McKinley et al., 2022, p. 7). Above all, disentangling the epistemic diversity could provide a strong baseline to foster dialogue between natural and social scientists who deal with coastal and marine ecosystems. A comprehensive overview could enhance the understanding of who speaks from which angle.

Although providing a first broad overview of sustainability-related marine social sciences articles, our analysis is limited in scope. Because our study was based on WoS as a single database, our analysis is not a complete rundown of the field. A supplementary analysis using Scopus as metadata or the Maritime Studies journal could further the understanding of the sustainability-related marine social science research field.

An in-depth content analysis of the 1,215 studies in our sample is clearly beyond the scope of our analysis. While such a review is desirable, given the vast and intricate nature of the field, it will probably require a narrower scope that concentrates on specific themes.

While marine social sciences are generally intertwined with sustainability issues, our search term put forth only studies that explicitly mentioned sustainability-related terms ( Figure 1 ). Because such terms are contested and authors define the terms differently, there might be relevant studies in the field that are not listed in our data. Relatedly, the topic of blue growth might be underrepresented in our study, as sustainability is already implicitly included in this term (for an overview of blue growth, see Liang et al., 2022b). As inherent to any bibliometric analysis, the search term might have skewed the results, pointing to the fact that our study represents an approximate solution reflecting sustainability-related marine social sciences research. While the majority of the studies can clearly be assigned to the domain of the social sciences, there might be a few that can be located at the intersection between social and natural sciences. This reflects the many touchpoints of the marine social sciences. Overall, verification with other sources could check the “completeness” of our results.

Despite these limitations, our study enriches the understanding of sustainability-related marine social science peer-reviewed research and proposes future avenues to discuss. As the field is continuously evolving and a single bibliometric study cannot grasp such a diverse field entirely, this article will hopefully encourage future research on the marine social science landscape and its role in contributing to the “ocean we want” (UNESCO-IOC, 2021).