Marine Protected Area Research and Global Governance Priorities: Thematic Shifts, Geographic Inequalities, and Science–Policy Alignment

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are central to global ocean conservation, yet the latent thematic organization of three decades of MPA research has not been systematically characterized. This study applies BERTopic, a transformer-based neural topic modeling framework, to 10,735 peer-reviewed publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science (1992–2025). Eight semantically coherent research themes were identified, and their structural relationships were quantified using the Relative Importance Factor (RIF) Index, a rank-based dominance measure derived from discrete power-law modeling. Marine Conservation Governance and Marine Biodiversity Patterns together account for 64.3% of the scientific output, forming the cognitive core of the field. Temporal analysis reveals that marine pollution, megafauna movement ecology, and Chinese coastal governance are the fastest-growing themes, yet they remain structurally peripheral, a phenomenon described here as accelerated marginality. Geographic analysis further identifies a pronounced epistemic governance gap, whereby countries hosting many of the world’s most valuable marine ecosystems contribute disproportionately little to the knowledge base guiding global conservation policy. Taken together, these findings carry a policy implication: achieving the objectives of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework will require not only expanding protected areas, but also rebalancing the thematic and geographic architecture of the research that underpins them.