Temporal evaluation of global trends in water footprint, water sustainability and water productivity research

Understanding Recent Trends in Global Sustainable Development Goal 6 Research: Scientometric, Text Mining and an Improved Framework for Future Research

The fulfilment of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, concerning water and sanitation, is critical in itself and also conditional for the other 16 SDGs being met. The purpose of this study was to understand the scientific research trajectories, spatiotemporal development, scientific collaboration, ongoing research themes, and gaps related to SDG 6. We propose a coupling of bibliometric and text mining methods in this work, to statistically portray the impact of water research on the accomplishment of SDG 6. Through the Web of Science database, we focused on a single UN SDG goal (i.e., six related publications that were current (2015–2021)). The study was performed on the chosen 289 publications. With the analysis of Keywords Plus, abstracts, titles, as well as author keywords, we looked at the performance of authors, publications, journals, institutions, and nations in terms of publishing. To obtain an insight into the water and sanitation study topic, we used co-citation, co-occurrence, cooperation networks, theme networks and cluster analysis, word dynamics, thematic evolution, and other techniques. We filtered out five distinguishing themes using text mining and showed their temporal trends. The main outcome is that participation, as well as collaboration with countries of the Global South, is still lacking in the SDG 6 research sphere. Therefore, as an insight from this study, we proposed a conceptual framework, the sustainable development of water and sanitation (SDWS) framework, to classify the research domain of water and sanitation regarding its connections to the environment, economy, and society (i.e., sustainable development). The scientometric and text analysis results provide the contemporary state and overview of the water and sanitation research field, whereas the second, conceptual framework section, provides a better understanding of qualitative contents, by revealing the insights gained, as well as the important work to be done in future water and sanitation studies.

Water Utilities Challenges: A Bibliometric Analysis

The water utilities are under big pressure to guarantee water access to their customers with the right level of service and quality due to challenges such as climate change, aging infrastructure, water scarcity, and growing populations, which put pressure on their operations. The scientific community has worked intensively over the last years to propose solutions and alternatives for the utilities to improve their operation and management in order to overcome these challenges. This paper aims to review scientific contributions to this field. The result shows increasing awareness from the scientific community in this topic which translates into a growing number of publications since the beginning of the current century. This paper analyzes the evolution of the publications, identifies the main countries and institutions working in this field and their scientific relationships over time. It also identifies the main keywords in the literature, which are grouped into three main topics: water quality, water management, and water optimization. The development of smart technologies is accelerating the scientific production towards the topic of water optimization, which is acquiring more importance over the last years. Future trends of research are related to identifying specific challenges per country and the specific solutions proposed by the scientific community to address them and its feasibility to be applied in other places.