This is a major failure of Elsevier.
Here's "Microprocessors and Microsystems."[1] This is supposed to be about embedded systems, which is generally a no-bullshit field. I'd never heard of this journal. People read Electronic Design, EE Times, "Embedded.com", maybe Control Systems Journal, etc. Those have either articles about how to do something, or "why what we're selling is great" articles.
Now look at the article titles in Microprocessors and Microsystems.[2] Here are the first three.
- COPS: A complete oblivious processing system
- A perceptron-based replication scheme for managing the shared last level cache
- Efficient underdetermined speech signal separation using encompassed Hammersley-Clifford algorithm and hardware implementation
Now those might be legitimate, although what they're doing in an embedded systems journal isn't clear. They're all behind a paywall, so it's hard to tell if they're any good.
"Oblivious processing" is a security concept. That belongs in a journal on security and encryption, where the crypto people will know what holes to look for. (Microsoft was doing work in this area in 2013, but I don't think a product emerged. If you can make it work, some cloud computing company can use it.)
Cache management belongs in a journal on CPU design, where people who have struggled to make caches work will take a look. There are people using perceptrons for this, which makes sense; a cache has to guess which things will be reused. (If this works well, someone should be trying it in web caches such as NGINX to improve cache hit rates.)
Signal separation is an active field, but this isn't a journal where you'd expect to find articles on it. Wikipedia has a good article on signal separation. The history of that article indicates attempts to sneak in citations to sketchy articles. No idea if the Hammersley-Clifford algorithm is even relevant. (If it's a significant advance, there's commercial value in this in improving audio quality for conferencing systems.)
So these papers were all sent to a journal where the odds of getting published are good, and the odds that the editors have no idea about the subject matter is high.
Why is Elsevier even publishing this journal?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/microprocessors-and-mi...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/microprocessors-and-mi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Signal_separation...