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Reputation
As you become more familiar with your discipline you will begin to find specific journals have the type of information you most interested in.
Acceptance Rate
There is an assumption that prestigious journals can afford to reject all but the best submissions. This is somewhat elitist and such journals tend to be reluctant to engage with authors holding non-traditional views. Taken to its logical reductio ad absurdum conclusion, the Journal of Universal Rejection ranks as the most prestigious journal in the history of our planet.
Indexing
Higher-tier journals tend to be indexed in multiple and larger databases. Sometimes a journal publisher will have exclusive rights for a database to be their sole outlet.
Some publishers, such and OMICS and Longdom have reputations for being "predatory publishers." As a result some of their journals are held in low-regard. Others are published abroad in India and elsewhere and have little coverage by major US database aggregators such as EBSCO, ProQuest, and Gale. The following example of the Longdom journal Sociology and Criminology--Open Access, is an example of a journal with relatively little indexing in the US.
Review Process
Journals of standing and repute, have a blind review process of some sort or another.
At a minimum, an editor will review a manuscript prior to publication.
In some academic journals, there is an editorial board that will decide if a manuscript gets published.
Often there is a blind process in which the reviewers read a manuscript without knowing who the author is and the author not knowing the reviewers.
In some cases, the reviewers have knowledge of the author.
While in other cases, the journal will publish the reviewers' names. In most cases, this does not happen.
Impact Factor
One of the new ways to calculate the significance of a journal is to look at how many citable articles are cited.
These configurations can be freely found in a number of sources:
Google Scholar
