Mapping and Analyzing the Scientific Outcomes in Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Lexical Co-occurrence Approach

One of the scientific mapping tools is the cohesion indicator, which uses the most important words in documents to study the conceptual structure of a research area. The purpose of the present study was to analyze the structure of the scientific map of autism outputs through lexical co-occurrence analysis in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Database.

This study was conducted using scientometric method. The research population consisted of 14,186 autism-related records published between the years 2010-2017 at the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Database. Moreover, the data were analyzed using social network analysis method.

The words “ability, malformations, syndrome, disorder, phenotype, and neurons” were the main vocabulary in the domain of autism spectrum disorder. These words also received the highest score in terms of centrality factors. Moreover, in terms of macro-indicators, the domain of autism was coherent. In this area, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada had produced more records compared to other countries. The universities of California, London, and Harvard had also been the most productive universities in the international arena. Among Iranian universities, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Islamic Azad University, and Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences had more productions than other universities. Among the top researchers in terms of number of international productions "Zwaigenbaum L.", "Matson JL." and "Gillberg C." and among Iranian researchers "Memari A", "Mashayedi P", and "Ahmadloo M" had the best works.

The information extracted from lexical co-occurrence map can help to improve policy-making in scientific fields; as in this map, each word or group of words represents a particular area. Therefore, efficient decisions can be made to allocate and distribute resources. Moreover, researchers will be able to get acquainted with new topics and top researchers in each field.</div>