To choose a journal in which to publish often depends on which motives and goals one has with the publication. Those are probably different if you are a doctoral student or a senior researcher. The question is what you want or have to prioritize from the perspective of your own context (your career), as well as external requirements from your employer or an external research funder. Here follows a couple of questions you might pose from a pair of overall aspects:
 

Timeliness

• Do I need to have my article published as soon as possible?
• Is it more important to publish in a journal that I think is best suited for my research even if there might be a risk of losing valuable time in the case of rejection or a longer publishing process, including revisions and so on?
   

External requirements

• Has my employer any requirements in which journal I should publish my article?
• Is it important that the journal is indexed and searchable in specific databases such as Web of Science?
• Is it important that the journal has high prestige, for example, a high impact factor?
• If I have received funding from a research funder, do they have any open access requirements, that is, am I required to make my article freely available to everyone?

These questions are important to pose and reflect upon as they are going to guide your choice of journal. In the following steps (2-5) we will, from the basis of each step, present different aspects of them as well as describing different resources that can be used to answer the questions you have.