There are numerous diverse papers that have addressed issues within maritime safety; to date there has been no comprehensive review of this literature to aggregate the causal factors within accidents in shipping and surmise current knowledge.This paper reviewed the literature on safety in three key areas: common themes of accidents, the influence of human error, and interventions to make shipping safer. The review included 20 studies of seafaring across the following areas: fatigue, stress, health, situation awareness, teamwork, decision-making, communication, automation, and safety culture.The review identifies the relative contributions of individual and organizational factors in shipping accidents, and also presents the methodological issues with previous research.The paper concludes that monitoring and modifying the human factors issues presented in this paper could contribute to maritime safety performance.This review illustrates which human factors issues are prevalent in incidents therefore this gives shipping practitioners a focus for interventions.