In every field or discipline, there are journals that scholars consider prestigious and influential. If you ask instructors about the most prestigious journals for research in their disciplines, they can easily name them.
Journals are judged by a variety of metrics that look at the impact of articles published in that journal. The metrics usually look at how many citations that papers published in the journal receive over time. The most common metric is the "journal impact factor."
The use of impact factor to determine the quality or significance of a journal has received criticism over the years as being used in appropriately to measure quality. Impact factor was originally designed as a tool for librarians to use when choosing journal subscriptions, and is a number that is easily manipulated and misued. See the below links for discussion of the problems with journal impact factor.