Its a little complicated when it comes to impact factors and sub-discipline journals. In my field, specialized journals on developmental psychology, highly resp

Its a little complicated when it comes to impact factors and sub-discipline journals. In my field, specialized journals on developmental psychology, highly respected journals have an impact factor around 4 or 5, like "Child Development" Psychology journals with impact factors around 2 to 3 are kind of the journals you publish in after trying others first, or if you just have a little study that needs publishing, but the results were not that interesting, or if there are some more serious issues in the design, but still worth publishing, etc. In the past I automatically suspected any journal with an impact factor less than 1 or 2 as being trash, but, it has recently come to my attention that there are highly respected journals with really low impact factors, just because it publishes on a highly specialized subfield, and thus don't get cited as frequently. So all in all, as an outsider, it can be a bit difficult. One possible way is to refer to SJR rankings by discipline: https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=2801 https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=2801 but this still fails for the extra specialized journals. Another possibility is to look at what authors are publishing in the journal. Are they from major research Universities? etc. But for a general rule of thumb: any journal with an impact over 2 is a legitimate journal, and any journal with an impact of 6 or more is a very solid journal, 9 up are considered top tier, 14 up are elite tiered.