Marine litter is a transboundary environmental issue that affects all the world’s oceans. Marine litter research is a young discipline but one that has exploded during the last five years. However, the increased knowledge of sources and underlying causes to marine litter, as well as knowledge regarding solutions, lack systematic review and synthesis. This study reviews the scientific discourses around plastic marine litter in Europe, and more specifically, in Norway and Denmark, and explores emerging discourse coalitions. Four main thematic storylines on the source-cause-solution causal relationship, as well as two emerging storylines within marine litter research, are found. This study concludes that in order to secure sustainability of solutions and to avoid risk transformation and greenwashing, more interdisciplinary research, including life cycle assessment, is needed. The data set contains three elements: *Full sample* contains all data (both excluded and included articles. Coloums can be sortet and filtered to focus on specific topics. Analysis concept based on PRISMA *Timeline* harvest relevant data from 'full sample' for table 4 in the article. Cross year topic-counts are used for figure 3 in the article. *Storyline-connections* harvest relevant data from 'full sample' for figure 3 in the article