Information sources

The Autistic Autism Scholarship Project uses several complementary sources to find and describe autism-related scholarship by autistic authors. This page explains what each source contributes, how publications are added, and the role and limitations of keywords and translations. The use of Dimensions is explained in a separate page linked below.

Which sources do we use?

OpenAlex: publications, authors and cited references

OpenAlex is a multidisciplinary catalogue of scholarly works. We use it to find publications associated with author profiles and, when available, their titles, abstracts, publication details and cited references. Its coverage includes different publication types, such as journal articles, books and preprints. Profiles can contain attribution errors or split one person's work across several profiles, so a name match alone is insufficient.

Crossref and DataCite: information linked to a DOI

A DOI is a persistent identifier for a publication or another research output. Crossref and DataCite provide descriptive information associated with these identifiers. Depending on the record, they help complete titles, author lists, dates and other publication details. Availability depends on what publishers and repositories have supplied; an abstract or a cited bibliography is not always available.

ORCID: distinguishing people

ORCID provides researcher identifiers and public profiles. We compare available names, affiliations and works to help distinguish people with similar names. An ORCID link identifies a researcher; it is not evidence of an autistic identity.

Semantic Scholar and Europe PMC: complementary information

Semantic Scholar complements information about publications, authors and citations. We also use its scientific fields to describe broad subject areas. Europe PMC, whose coverage focuses on life sciences and biomedical literature, provides keywords and indexing terms, including Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) where available. A publication outside this scope, or with a sparse record, may have no terms from this source.

Dimensions: finding publications to examine

Dimensions is used by an internal discovery tool to identify articles that may contain statements about autistic authorship. Groups of search expressions combine autism-related terms with wording about authors, teams or positionality. Read how we use Dimensions and view the current search criteria.

How do publications enter the project?

Publications can be found through a known author's work, through a DOI, or through the discovery tool using Dimensions. Scheduled searches also help identify additions to authors' publication lists. A publication must concern autism and have autistic authorship documented.

What prevents mistaken matches and duplicate publications?

Identifiers and bibliographic information help distinguish people with similar names and recognize publications already known to AutiHub. A publication used by another AutiHub project can be included here without creating a second bibliographic record.

Checks also flag related versions, such as a preprint and a later journal publication, so they can be reviewed together. Earlier decisions not to include a publication, or to remove it from the project, help prevent it from being proposed repeatedly. These safeguards assist review; they cannot eliminate every attribution or versioning error.

Keywords, scientific fields and translations

Keywords and scientific fields

Keywords describe specific topics; scientific fields describe broader areas such as psychology. MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings: a standardized vocabulary developed by the US National Library of Medicine to describe biomedical and health-related subjects and make publications easier to find. These indexing terms differ from keywords supplied by authors. We keep the origins of terms distinguishable because the sources describe publications differently. Learn more about MeSH.

Which texts are translated?

For publications in languages other than French, AutiHub can generate French translations of the available titles and abstracts. This includes English and other languages, such as Spanish, German or Dutch. Publications recorded as French are not sent for this French translation. The full text of the publication is not translated by this process.

Keywords, indexing terms and scientific fields are handled separately: English and French versions are provided alongside the original terms. A term already in the requested language can remain unchanged.

These translations are generated automatically with OpenAI and can be corrected. They are reading and search aids, and may contain errors. A French translation may not yet be available for every publication. Titles and abstracts are not systematically translated into English or into other languages.

How should the figures and gaps be interpreted?

Project statistics concern publications included in the project. A bibliographic record that is no longer associated with any project is not counted as a project publication. Publications and the references they cite are separate sets: the same cited work or person may appear in several bibliographies.

Counts of appearances and counts of distinct people answer different questions. Statements about unnamed autistic authors also differ from individually identified authors; an exact number, a minimum and an unspecified number should not be read as equivalent evidence.

No source covers all scholarship, and records can arrive late or omit abstracts, author identifiers or cited references. Search wording and languages also affect what can be found. The project is therefore a developing resource, not an exhaustive census. Missing information does not mean that a publication or an autistic contribution does not exist.