The Human Right to Water and Sanitation: Using Natural Language Processing to Uncover Patterns in Academic Publishing

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors

I read your manuscript with great interest and would like to start by congratulating on your well researched analysis of this relevant topic of human rights to water.

I have a small set of comments, and suggestions you may want to consider.

1. Please revisit the concepts of inter and multidisciplinarity – it seems to me that you do not use them consistently when you state for example “the interdisciplinary nature of the field” – I think that it should be” multidisciplinary nature” (and an interdisciplinary approach to address that multidimensionality of the water problems).

2. In page 7 – Figure 2 – you present the 30 ‘top’ journal’ according to the criteria you followed – it can be considered unclear and subjective as you also recognize on line 439 of the pg 12 – and again the issue of what is considered ‘interdisciplinary’ is here of great relevance, so maybe you need to objectivize more clearly your ranking.

3. In your conclusive discussion, I think you need to refer to possible inter-sectional topics’ contents (e.g., climate change and security) that might be uncovered by the classifications you did – I am not questioning those classifications, since you clearly sated the method, and you are aware of its subjectivity. But since you also noticed the low presence of ‘climatic factors’ facing ‘water security’ I thought this might deserve a deeper analysis.

4. In line 448 and onwards (pg. 12) I think you acknowledge the most problematic conflict or contradiction of this approach – human rights were for several decades raised abundantly across non-academic literature and not as much in peer reviewed and indexed journals (in your own words: “…a central difficulty in conducting such a study is the ability to identify a clear corpus from which to draw articles, reports, and so on”); so I agree when you state that it is relevant and important to understand what has been the trend in academic literature, and see this research as a useful starting point – but then I suggest you state that upfront, and reflect the scope of your analysis in the manuscript title somehow:

The Human Right to Water and Sanitation: Using Natural Language Processing to Uncover Trends and Topics from 1990 to 2020 (in academic literature)

Wishing you the best for your submission

The reviewer

Author Response

Please See the Attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This article discusses trends in literature for 30 years regarding the human right to water and sanitation.

This is a really interesting topic to discuss. Overall, the manuscript is informative methods are well described, results are reliable, and well discussed. I have a few comments as below:

1. The topic is important: The Human Right to Water and Sanitation. There is no doubt about it. However, the significance and importance of this research should be discussed more comprehensively. Authors may consider providing answers to questions like below:
1.1. Why the study of the "trends of literature" on the topic of the human right to water and sanitation is important?
1.2. What is the "knowledge gap" that the authors want to cover?
1.3. What is the most important lesson that the authors are trying to teach to the readers?
1.4. Is the approach scientifically acceptable? How?
I invite the authors to discuss these matters in both abstract and introduction.

2. The human right to water and sanitation should sustain. In this regard, discussing sustainability seems to be essential. Therefore, I wish to invite the authors' to consider providing more discussion on the concept of "sustainability." Several indexes are designed to evaluate the sustainability of a sanitation system in a community. Here is a list of some publications in this regard, sorted based on publishing time.
2020: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12176937
2015: https://doi.org/10.3390/su71114537
1999: https://doi.org/10.2166/wst.1999.0244

It will be great if the author may want to discuss these indexes in the introduction or discussion section of this paper and mention how their study can have a contribution to the development of such indexes with a more human rights orientation.

3. Please consider a few minor modifications:
3.1. Please provide appropriate keywords.
3.2. In figure 2, what is the x-axis? please describe it in the diagram not only in the caption.
3.3. In figure 3, how about describing the x-axis as "percent?" It then may be easier to understand.
3.4. In figure 4, what is the y-axis? Please provide appropriate captions.
3.5. In figure 5, again, what are the x-axises?
3.6. I suggest providing appendix A as separately provided supplementary materials. Then the authors can have freedom in formating them and improve the readability.

Author Response

Please see the Attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I have checked both authors' responses and modified the manuscript.

The authors' responses are acceptable and reasonable. I also think the manuscript has been significantly improved.

I have no further comments.