Search strategy

Search for peer-reviewed literature will be conducted under the guidance of an experienced health Services librarian. The following search terms and their combinations will be used: 'autism', OR 'autism spectrum disorder', AND either of the following terms: 'menarche', 'menstruation, 'menses', 'menopause', dysmenorrhea', 'PMDD', 'premenstrual dysphoric disorder', and ‘premenstrual’. Date of publication limit (1980) will be applied. The final search results will be exported into Excel and duplicates were removed by the first author, with subsequent verification by the second author. Two reviewers will independently screen all titles and abstracts of potential references, excluding those that did not meet the search criteria. The full texts of the papers will then be independently screened by both authors, with discrepancies resolved by consensus between the authors. Next, the two authors will separately check the included papers’ reference lists for identifying additional relevant studies. In the final step, we will glimpse at Google scholar for articles’ citing current publications, maximizing our efforts to collect all relevant studies.