Autism Insights

The amount of medical literature describing autism spectrum disorder has become a real challenge as the quantity of abstracts deposited in PubMed digital library is constantly growing. Because the major manifestation of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is impairment in language acquisition and communication, we used primary key words “autism” and “language acquisition” to retrieve the relevant literature from PubMed digital library and annotated a collection of 274 abstracts (from December 2008 to 1976) using Knowtator. The objective was to locate secondary key words which in combination with primary key words would enable one to make information retrieval on language development in autism more specific and focused. The discussion provides a brief description of some selected terms and compares language impairment in autism with normal language development.

Conclusion: By using the combination of key words one is able to effectively manage the information retrieval and make the research less time consuming.