Advance In International Autism Spectrum Disorder Research Based On Mapping Knowledge Domain

Autism spectrum disorder(ASD)researches have a history of over70 years.Researches on ASD have been being paid more and more attention in the international community,which shows the trend of cross-disciplinary integration,so recognizing clearly the history of ASD researches,knowing better its status,and grasping profoundly its mainstream trend is particularly important.Traditional research methods cannot meet the needs of the rapid development of scientific research,knowledge mapping,as a new emerging research method recent years,has widely applied in disciplines such as Library and Information Science,medicine,metrology.This study employs word frequency analysis,co-word analysis,citation analysis,co-citation analysis,cluster analysis,overlay analysis and other theories and techniques.With the help of information visualization software such as VOSviewer and CiteSpace,the author draws the scientific knowledge mapping in the field of the international ASD so that the general distribution,knowledge base,frontier and hot topic of this field are displayed and analyzed visually.First,researches on the international ASD are described in general.From the two databases(SCIE,SSCI)at the core of the Web of Science in the United States are collected 27327 relevant data samples,with an annual literature published growing exponentially,being English-based and taking development psychology as its main discipline.Secondly,researches on the regional distribution and cooperative relationship the international ASD are carried out.Geographical distribution shows a significant Matthew effect;ASD research geographical distribution is mainly concentrated in Europe and the United States.The United States is the largest country in the field of ASD research;the University of California,Los Angeles has the largest number of article publications.Country and institution cooperation network is drawn via VOSviewer,which indicates that the United States,Britain and Canada have carried out extensive cooperation with many other countries and regional similarity and academic similarity are the two factors of institutional cooperation.Then,co-citation knowledge mapping of research literature on international ASD is made by CiteSpace to discover its knowledge base and research fronts quickly and accurately.The knowledge base is discussed in depth according to the clustering results.The study has found that the knowledge base are prominently focused on the ASD related screening and diagnosis scale,and different in content in different periods.The turning point literature are also analyzed according to betweenness centrality index.After research fronts are detected by use of Citation Burst affiliated to CiteSpace,the author has found there are a large number of literature representing research fronts.Finally,VOSviewer is used to analyze the distribution and evolution of the research topics of the international ASD.The research topic distribution of the field is analyzed through the word frequency.The research topic development trend is shown through topic overlay mapping.It has been found that the research hot topic of ASD is focused on five aspects:psychology,brain and nerve,social development/intervention,education and social problem.The research results are summarized through the above analysis.The shortcomings and its potential prospect of this study are also pointed out.