The topic of microplastics has experienced a drastic surge in scientific publications in the last decade. Academic publications on this topic have seen an exponential growth starting in 2015 (Fig. ). The number of publications went from 81 in 2011 to 2811 in 2021. Patent publications on the other hand have not experienced such drastic growth. One can still observe an increase from 104 publications in 2015 to 283 in 2020 that does follow the publication trend of journals, with a slight decrease in 2021 (Fig. and Supporting Fig. ).