Autism is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts individuals across different genders, ages, races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic groups. One promising, multidisciplinary area of research interest in this space is Virtual Reality (VR). This project reviews domestic and international collaboration patterns and scholarly interest relating to VR applications for autistic individuals. The analysis uses 215 empirical papers screened and selected from 1,050 papers retrieved from the Web of Science database. Findings show that (a) papers on this topic are largely the product of collaborations, with the number of domestically collaborated papers (183 papers (86%)) over six times higher than that of internationally collaborated papers (30 papers (14%)) and with the top 3 countries with collaboratively authored papers being US (n = 100), UK (n = 32), and India (n = 20); (b) collaboration has increased over time; and (c) domestically collaborated papers tend to be on the rise, most notably since 2018. In terms of research trends relating to VR for autistic individuals, topics of study are comparable between domestically collaborated papers and internationally collaborated papers, with a few notable exceptions relating to the focus of study.
