The scientific performance, impact, influence, or utility of a research article can be measured objectively by its total citation count (Sureka et al. 2020). The most influential articles among those included in this study are listed in Table 2. The most cited – ‘Nanoparticle decorated anodes for enhanced current generation in microbial electrochemical cells’ – uses only linear regression, which belongs to a subset of AI algorithms known as supervised machine learning models (Murphy 2012). Of the 108 articles that cite the work by Fan et al. (2011), none addresses the use of any AI algorithms as verified in the Web of Science database, meaning that the article is popular because of the experimental results and methodology rather than the Linear Regression model used.