Bibliographic dataset on Marine Protected Area research indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, 1992–2025

This dataset contains the bibliographic corpus used in the article “Marine Protected Area Research and Global Governance Priorities: Thematic Shifts, Geographic Inequalities, and Science–Policy Alignment”. The corpus includes peer-reviewed journal articles and reviews on Marine Protected Areas indexed in Scopus and Web of Science between 1992 and 2025. Records were retrieved using the search term “marine protected area*” in title, abstract, and author keyword fields. Records from both databases were merged and deduplicated using DOI, title, and author information. Records without title or abstract were excluded, as were book chapters, conference proceedings, editorials, and letters. The dataset was used to characterize the thematic, temporal, and geographic structure of Marine Protected Area research through transformer-based topic modeling with BERTopic, SciBERT embeddings, UMAP dimensionality reduction, HDBSCAN clustering, c-TF-IDF topic representation, and Relative Importance Factor analysis. This dataset is provided to support transparency, reproducibility, and reuse of the bibliometric and topic modeling analysis reported in the associated article.