Publishing an article in a journal is no longer that difficult; as many electronic journals are available to make our work easily exposed to the audience. What measures and features of a good academic journal you would expect to see in the journal in which you would plan to publish your work?
It highly depends on the research field, which journal you wish to publish in etc. In general, those journals that publish work outside of their field (i.e. journal of communication that also publishes on parent-teacher conferences) seriously peck away at the credibility in my opinion.
What I personally look for is a certain amount of consistancy throughout the journal and across different issues. For example, if you agree to publish APA style, make sure everything is APA style, not just parts and do not deviate of that style.
On a content level: a difficult or large analysis does not make it a better article or journal. The right analysis is much more important. Taking away the right conclusions (not forcing significant results by changing methods) is also important. Connecting the proposed (existing) theory with the performed research.
Finally, when you look at rankings of journals; there are several methods. A strong method in my opinion is the eigenvector which ranks a journal based on citations and in which citations in higher ranked journals are weighed so that those citations contribute more to the eigenvector.
A major pitfall of most rankings in my opinion is that due to social media and the internet, availability of the journals can cause hypes where none-researchers also cite scientific journals. However, as is often the case with laymen, they tend to cite research they understand (both in content and text) rather than high quality work that might be more difficult to understand.
It all boils down to the quality of individual articles, and the amount of quality articles that are present in a journal.
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