[mistaken]

I think what they're hinting at is that without SciHub, even a popular paper would have less exposure. Some papers which cite a popular publication can only do so, because they could download the referenced one through SciHub.

[subroutine]

I don't think anyone questions that some articles have been cited because they were downloaded from scihub.

This was still a garbage attempt to 'prove' this conclusion. And I don't have any faith the authors measured the true magnitude of these effects.