Marine ecosystem provides food, social and cultural services, offering crucial support for regulation of global environment. But the loss of marine resources and the deterioration of ecological environment have seriously threatened the service function of marine ecosystem. Marine ecosystem service value assessment quantifies ecosystem service value, improves people’s perception of marine ecosystem service function, enhances people’s willingness to pay for environmental protection, and provides the theoretical support and scientific basis for the decision-making of marine ecological environment governance. Therefore, it is of great necessity to realize the common goal of sustainable development via the study of marine ecosystem service value. This paper presents an analysis of publications, from a bibliometric perspective, on marine ecosystem service value from 1995 to 2021. The data of academic publications were retrieved from the Web of Science database. R language and VOSviewer software were adopted to evaluate the research status, research topics and theme evolution in marine ecosystem service value. Relevant researches have attracted wide attention worldwide with an exponentially increasing trend since 2008. The United States had an absolute leading position in this area. Relevant researches were presented in Ecosystem Services, Ecological Economics, Journal of Environmental Management, Science of the Total Environment, and other top journals. In addition, research topics related to marine ecosystem service value were mainly concentrated on dynamic changes of marine ecosystem service under the background of global environmental change, classification and quantification of marine ecosystem service value, evaluation of marine ecosystem service value and its practical application, with a close association between them. Research hotspots were focused on climate change, the impact of sea level rise on marine biodiversity and community structure, vegetation coverage and marine ecosystem resilience, marine ecosystem service function and value assessment, resource development and sustainable development of marine ecosystem. After multi-stage development, a marine ecosystem service value research system was formed, composed of three themes: marine ecosystem services, marine ecosystem management and marine ecosystem protection. In the foreseeable future, there will be more researches about the improvement of marine ecosystem service valuation system, the application of marine ecosystem service valuation in ecosystem management and protection, and the application of marine ecosystem service valuation in ecosystem restoration and compensation. This analysis can help researchers and scholars better understand the intellectual structure of the field and identify the future research directions, which provides references for future researches.