Sources and methodology

Why this page exists

You should be able to check our work. That means being open about how an article was made: where its claims come from, why we trusted one source over another, and where the evidence stopped being reassuring.

This page describes that process honestly — including the parts that are imperfect. We would rather you know our limitations than mistake us for an authority we are not.

How we choose topics

We start from the questions autistic adults actually ask rather than from whatever is convenient to answer. Some of those questions come from the questions we see repeated in autistic communities; others come from the topics research is actively exploring. The test for whether we write about something is simple: would a clear, honest explainer genuinely help someone? If the answer is no, we leave it alone.

We do not chase controversy for its own sake. But when a topic is hard or contested, we would rather address it carefully than avoid it.

Which sources we prefer

Not all evidence is equally trustworthy, so we weight sources. In rough order of preference:

1. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses — studies that pool the results of many primary studies, which give the most reliable picture of what the field as a whole has found.
2. High-quality primary studies — well-conducted individual studies, particularly for recent findings that reviews have not yet caught up with.
3. Major clinical guidance and public-health sources — used for baseline definitions and recognised names for things, not as a substitute for primary evidence.
4. First-person and community knowledge — the lived experience autistic people describe, which is often ahead of the published literature and which we try to weigh alongside it.

When we rely on a study, we prefer to link it directly so you can read it yourself. Where a source is paywalled, we still cite it so the trail is there even if the full text is not.

How we weigh what we find

Finding a study is only the beginning. Reading it well matters more. We try to ask the same questions of every source: how large and how recent is the study? Are the findings echoed elsewhere, or are they an outlier? Are the authors measuring what they claim to measure? And — importantly — does the study include autistic people's own accounts, or only observations from the outside?

We are mindful that a citation is not the same as proof. A study "is associated with", "reports", or "suggests" — it rarely, on its own, proves. Our writing tries to preserve those distinctions instead of collapsing them into a single confident sentence.

How we handle uncertainty

A lot of what we write about is genuinely unsettled. Autistic burnout and masking, for example, are real experiences that research is only now beginning to study systematically. When the evidence is thin, mixed, or early, we say so directly, in the article, rather than hiding the uncertainty behind confident phrasing.

We also distinguish between what is known and what is a reasonable, evidence-informed interpretation. Both are worth publishing — but they must not be confused, and it is our job to keep them separate.

The limits of our process

Here is the honest part: our process has limits, and we want you to know them rather than assume otherwise.

• We are not peer reviewers. Our articles are reviewed internally for care and correctness, but they do not pass through the formal peer-review system that governs academic publication.
• We are human, and mistakes happen. We work hard to be accurate, but an error can slip through. When it does, we correct it and note the change.
• The science moves. A claim that was reasonable when we published may be revised, or overturned, by later research. We update when we can, but an older article may still reflect the understanding of its time.
• Evidence is not the only kind of truth. Lived experience is real knowledge that often precedes formal research. We honour it, but we also do not pretend it is interchangeable with a peer-reviewed finding.

For how this methodology is enforced across everything we publish, see our editorial policy.