Mapping Global Research on Ocean Literacy: Implications for Science, Policy, and the Blue Economy

Abstract

In recent years, ocean literacy has become a global movement that connects the human dimension to the ocean and intends to be an incentive for positive change in people’s behavior. As multiple initiatives on ocean literacy have arisen, a comprehensive understanding of this topic is required to better engage the broader society. In the present study, we applied a combination of bibliometric analysis and science mapping to a dataset of scientific publications on ocean literacy between 2005 and 2019, obtained from Web of Science and Scopus databases. In order to represent the development of the field, analyze the level of collaborations and uncover its thematic areas, we first used bibliometric analyses to describe the field’s main features, including indicators of growth and research collaboration. We then used science mapping techniques to build collaboration networks among countries and institutions, and to identify research communities. Lastly, we performed co-word analysis to reveal the underlying thematic areas and their evolution. Our results reveal a slow-growing number of publications and a promising trend for collaboration among authors, countries and institutions. Education and science were identified as the two major thematic areas on ocean literacy showing that, over time, issues related to these themes have gained more attention among researchers. These findings confirm that ocean literacy is gaining more acknowledgment within the scientific community but still faces considerable limitations to its dissemination in sectors like the blue economy and in regions such as Latin America and Africa. Promoting cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary cooperation among research institutions, marine education networks and the industry is critical to support this purposeful movement and represents an urgent challenge.

Bibliometric Analysis on Ocean Literacy Studies for Marine Conservation

“…While, in our study, the countries with the highest production were the United States, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, in Costa and Caldeira's study, Canada was considered one of the three countries with the highest production. In turn, these differences were confirmed when comparing another bibliometric study by the authors Paredes-Coral et al [76], "Mapping Global Research on Ocean Literacy: Implications for Science, Policy, and the Blue Economy", where there were differences in both the scientific production of countries and the topics found. Other studies used bibliometrix [77], and BibExcel and Pajek [78] software, whereas our study used four laws, a bibliometric indicator, and VOSviewer software.…”

“…An important limitation we found in this research was to have identified a scarce number of specific publications on ocean literacy bibliometric research [74,76], which limits direct scientific discussions. Finally, as future research lines, we recommend further investigation of specific aspects related to ocean literacy with a thematic orientation [47] and to demonstrate connections among blue environment domains with comparative studies.…”

Identifying the Blue Economy Global Epistemic Community

“…Establishing the comparisons in this article, in terms of meta-analytical science measurements [72], we can detail work on a generic search vector that attempts to study the Blue Economy, without the emphasis or sectoral limitations that other recently published literature has had [21,40], allowing a panoramic view of this economy type. A single database is also used, which allows a homogeneous comparison between the extracted articles-mainly Scopus articles that not indexed in JCR-WoS, given their non-homologous nature [73], establishing in this methodological aspect differences with recent bibliometric articles published on topics related to the Blue Economy [21,74]; although, with the consequent elitization of the sample, in search of defining the epistemic community and its referents, internal comparisons are achieved with a higher methodological quality.…”

The evolution of ocean literacy: A new framework for the United Nations Ocean Decade and beyond

“…At its simplest, ocean literacy can be defined as 'an understanding of your influence on the ocean, and it's influence on you' (NMEA, 2020;Schoedinger et al, 2005); however, the simplicity of this definition belies the complexities of contemporary ocean literacy, and indeed, whether ocean literacy is an appropriate term (MacNeil et al, 2021). While the role and importance of ocean literacy in supporting and delivering effective global ocean governance has received increasing recognition in recent years (Kelly et al, 2022a;Paredes-Coral et al, 2021), to truly understand the role of ocean literacy for the UN Ocean Decade and beyond, it is first necessary to explore the evolution of the ocean literacy concept.…”