Literature coverage regarding MPAs in Scotland

Most of the news articles that I have used in my blogs so far have not been scientific research articles. I have mostly used internet based searches, such as Google, and have been able to gather a variety of online sources, including maps and news articles. The advantage of these sources is that they have all been open access so any member of the public can utilise them if need be. However, with this post I would like to address the coverage of actual scientific literature surrounding MPAs in Scotland.

To do this I used Google Scholar, an online search engine that is widely used when searching for any sort of peer-reviewed article, it isn't strictly scientific based. I simply input the keywords "Scotland" and "marine protected areas" into the browser and searched for articles relating to this criteria. All in all, Google Scholar returned just over 76,600 results over an unrestricted time frame. To get an insight into recent publications relating to Scottish MPAs, I also narrowed the search down to articles released since 2012, which returned just over 16,200 results.

It may therefore seem that Scottish MPAs have seen rather a lot of coverage in scientific literature. This however will not be completely the case. By simply observing some of the results, I am able to notice that not all of the articles are truly only related to Scottish MPAs. Some articles may be related to MPAs in the rest of the UK, which have included a Scottish example within their study. Google Scholar still recognises this as a result relating to Scottish MPAs rather than as an example from a wider study. This is also the case for studies related to organisms that are found within Scottish MPAs. The study may not particularly relate to the MPA, but it has been mentioned in the article so has returned a result.

Google Scholar also has the annoying tendency to give results that relate to online books or even just lists a citation without actually providing a copy of the original article. I have encountered this all the way through my university degree, both undergraduate and postgraduate, and it can be highly inconvenient.

Also, the vast majority of articles that tend to be on Google Scholar have the problem of being from a paid journal. There is the occasional article from an open access journal, such as PLOS Biology, but most tend to be from paid journals. This relates well to the problem I raised in my first blog post regarding open access data in science and the lack of it there is. The fact that there are many quality articles that can not be accessed by the public unless they are willing to pay for a subscription fee is rather ridiculous.