Scientific and Technological Developments in Brain-Computer Interfaces: Dual Bibliometric Analysis of Articles and Patents.
Junhui Wang, Yakun Yuan, Hang Xu and 1 others
PMID 42721195WHAT IT FOUND
Brain-computer interface articles and patents grew through 2025, but patents cited 50 of 157 highly cited papers and the mean time lag between patent grant year and article publication year was 8.8 years.
Key findings
01Brain-computer interface articles and patents both peaked in 2025, at 1705 articles and 371 patents.
0250 of the 157 highly cited brain-computer interface papers were cited by patents after publication.
03The mean time lag between patent grant year and publication year of cited articles was 8.8 years.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Only Web of Science articles were included, so PubMed or Scopus papers may be missing. Keyword thresholds may have missed emerging topics such as neural data ownership, ethics and privacy security. The disruption index analysis covered only works published through 2020 because it needs a five-year citation window, so later changes were not captured. The paper reports citation and patent counts, not patient outcomes.
Declared interests
Funded by the Humanity and Social Science Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education of China under grant 21YJC870016. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that brain-computer interface use improves patient function. It counts articles and patents, not patient outcomes.