Sir

There is a crisis in the world's oceans1,2,3,4. Myriad human impacts — from coastal development, pollution and habitat alteration to introduction of invasive species, overfishing and climate change — seriously jeopardize marine ecosystems and the services they provide. How much research is being done in these crucial areas?

Earlier analyses in the period up to 1996 documented that marine ecosystems were represented by only around 5% of papers in two main applied-ecology journals5,6. We have discovered that there is still, eight years later, negligible emphasis on marine issues in the conservation-biology literature and that conservation receives very limited attention in the general marine and fisheries literature. For example, only about 5% of papers in leading marine-ecological journals deal with pollution, nonindigenous species, overfishing or marine protected areas.

We next asked if the impact of terrestrial papers published in Conservation Biology differed from the impact of marine papers. To do this, we looked up every research paper published in Conservation Biology in 1997 in ISI's Web of Science and tallied the number of citations each paper received (we chose 1997 to allow time for papers to be assimilated into the literature). Papers on marine topics were cited an average of 7.1 (s.d. 3.5) times, whereas terrestrial articles were cited an average 18.2 times (s.d. 14.6). Thus, not only were fewer articles being published about marine conservation, but those that were published appeared to have less impact than research on terrestrial habitats.

Most attention to conservation issues has focused on the terrestrial realm, but it is clear that the oceans face an increasingly severe array of problems. Humans might well focus first on the habitat they themselves inhabit, but it is clearly time for more attention and resources to be directed towards the oceans. The limited rigorous scientific research that has been done has exposed many of the flaws in our present management paradigms7. Our ability to overcome the problems will surely depend on the contributions of science.