Figure 3. Research Methods Used in the ASD Research Publications Analysis.

A flow diagram.  There are four connected text boxes that describe, in order, the general research methods used in this analysis.  Box one describes step one: 25,137 autism-related research publications were identified from 1980 to 2010 by searching the Thomson Reuters Science Wire publication catalog for autism-related key words and MeSH terms. Step two: Publication attributes were parsed for further analysis, including author addresses, funding acknowledgments, citation counts, and journal subject categories. Step three: Articles published in the year 2010 were manually categorized by research emphasis, where research categories corresponded with the IACC strategic plan’s seven critical questions. Step four: Manually assigned publications were used to develop an automated categorization tool. In this step, abstracts and titles of publications were used as training text, which was continually refined to increase the accuracy of an automated categorization tool. Eventually, all publications from 1980 to 2009 were categorized by the automated tool.