Scientific research trends in gifted individuals with autism spectrum disorder: A Bibliographic Scattering Analysis (1998-2020)

ABSTRACT This study used the bibliographic scattering analysis to explore the scientific publications trends on gifted individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) over the past 23 years. The study examined the applicability and appropriateness of Bradford’s and Lotka’s laws of scattering to measure the impact factors of journals, institutions, countries, researchers, and personal publications on the area of research. After examining 95 research papers published in 55 Social Sciences Citation Indexed (SSCI) journals from 1998 to 2020. The rank list was prepared to identify the core journals in education. Themost frequent venues of journals in descending order of times cited are, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Science (USA) with 33.8% of citation, followed by the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (USA) with 10.3% of citation and Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (USA) with 8.2% of citation. The top four categories of research were psychology with 37.13% of publications, followed by psychiatry (13.77%), neurosciences and neurology (11.38%), and education (8.38%). The study found that Asperger syndrome (AS) is still used in academic studies, even after it was immersed in the ASD by DSM-5 criteria. The findings and limitations were presented and discussed.