Water security and its implications for sanitation and hygiene remain a critical global challenge and are the focus of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6). Acknowledging the diversity and rapid growth of research on SDG 6—and more broadly on water and sanitation—this study conducts a science mapping analysis of the literature in this domain. The purpose of this type of analysis, in the context of a substantial and rapidly expanding body of research, is to assess the range of issues addressed within this multidisciplinary domain and to identify areas that remain underexplored or have received comparatively limited scholarly attention. Drawing on a corpus of 3,068 articles published between 1993 and 2024 and indexed in Scopus, we applied the SPAR-4-SLR protocol to perform a thematic evolution analysis over the entire period, alongside a bibliographic coupling analysis focused on the 2020–2024 period to capture recent research trends. Both analyses were triangulated with author keyword co-occurrence analyses. In this respect, our analysis shows that several issues still lack dedicated investigation. Our findings highlight a persistent research gap in the financial dimensions of SDG 6, with limited attention to funding mechanisms for equitable and sustainable access and a fragmentation of research efforts on these issues. These results suggest that future research should prioritize innovative financing models, inclusive governance frameworks, and data-driven strategies to improve infrastructure investment and policy effectiveness, as well as stronger collaboration within the scientific community on these specific issues.
Moroz et al. (Thu,) studied this question.