Bibliometric analysis is a method of reviewing scientific literature. It is particularly useful for analyzing research areas with a large number of scientific publications. One such extensive research area with rapidly growing scientific production is the field of research on autism spectrum disorders (hereinafter ASD). Previous bibliometric analyses on ASD have usually not been limited to the field of education, which is why they largely report on the medical context of ASD research.
In this master's thesis, we aimed to examine the development, structure and research trends of ASD research in the field of special education. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications on ASD in special educational journals. We defined the set of scientific publications by a search query that was used in the bibliographic database Web of Science Core Collection. Our final set included 6,091 scientific publications.
We used the Biblioshiny and Gephi programs for the analysis. We examined the annual production of scientific publications and found that the growth of the field is nonlinear, but persistent. There has been particularly strong growth since 2019. We also identified the authors, journals and countries that have contributed the most scientific publications. The author Johnny L. Matson, the journal Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders and the country of the United States of America dominated in terms of the amount of scientific production. Results have shown that the most cited scientific publication in the studied set is titled The impact of behaviour problems on caregiver stress in young people with autism spectrum disorders by the authors L. Lecavalier, S. Leone and J. Wiltz.
We also created bibliographic networks of co-occurrence of keywords, co-authorships and co-citation of references, with which we visualized the conceptual, social and intellectual structure of the research field. We discovered key concepts that commonly appear in the studied set. We analyzed their formation into thematic communities and thus discovered the research topics that are most common. We investigated the patterns of author collaboration and thus identified the main collaborative communities of leading researchers, for whom we also determined the research topics that they engage with. In addition, we discovered key cited references on which the research field is based. We analyzed their connectedness and thus examined the research topics and ideas that have shaped the research field as it is today. Based on the results, we also identified marginal topics which show potential for further research.
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