When early wear occurs at the friction pairs after the running-in period of a marine diesel engine,because the wear loss is not large,and the values of various metal elements in lubricating oil do not exceed the detec-tion limit.The analysts may determine that the wear is normal.When it exceeds the detection limit,less experi-enced technicians are uncertain about analyzing and locating the sources of the elements of wear particles.By analyz-ing the oil spectrum data of marine diesel engines,this paper finds that the correlation coefficient method can effec-tively solve the above problems,which provides a new application for the fault diagnosis of marine diesel engines us-ing oil analysis technology.