Abstract
After years of advocacy and international negotiation, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to officially recognize a stand-alone human right to water and sanitation on 28 July 2010. Since, academic scholarship has continued to grow in an effort to understand the implications of the codification of this human right. Yet, with this growth, it has become impractical if not impossible for scholars to keep up with the advancement of academic knowledge or to make sense of it in a systematic way. In short, to date, we know very little about the trends in the literature as they have unfolded over the past thirty years and the topics to which scholars have devoted significant attention within the broader field, particularly over time. This is an important area of inquiry, as developing a comprehensive understanding of where prior literature has focused and where it appears to be going offers scholars an opportunity to identify areas in need of refinement and/or increased attention. Given the practicalities of reading thousands of research papers each year, this project utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to identify topics and trends in academic literature on the human right to water and sanitation (HRtWS). NLP provides the opportunity to digest large quantities of text data through machine learning, culminating with descriptive information on trends and topics in the field since 1990. The results of this exercise show that the research related to the human right to water and sanitation has grown exponentially, particularly over the last decade, illustrates the multidisciplinary nature of the literature, and demonstrates the diversity of topics in the field.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilMaking sense of the expansive literature on the human right to water and sanitation (HRtWS) is understandably difficult
Given that the human right to water and sanitation contains a wide range of papers topically, some concerned with chemical or engineering facets, we reduced the dictionary to only nouns
Between 1990 and 1999 a total of 1059 articles were published related to the human right to water and/or sanitation, accounting for approximately 7.6% of all articles published during the temporal scope of our exploration
Summary
Water is an essential component for all human life, it was not included as part of the landmark United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This movement towards creating standalone human rights to water and sanitation culminated in the UN declaration of water and sanitation as a human right in 2010 This right created a wave of optimism that swept through the international community with many scholars and practitioners expecting significant, lasting benefits on public health and standards of living as a result [10,11]. In tandem with these international developments that gradually recognized the HRtWS was a vibrant, expansive academic and grey multidisciplinary literature that used various lenses to examine the potential value of elevating water and sanitation to standalone human rights [12,13]. We take these recommendations as the starting point for our project, which seeks to provide a clearer picture of the disparate literature on the human right to water and sanitation
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