There are impact factors and top lists, and you can check out the Wikipedia page of the journal if it exists. You can google what are the "top journals for <field in question>". You can check the publisher. IEEE and Springer for example tend to be genuine.
But you still have to look at the individual paper and can't believe it just based on a single article. Research articles are for sharing results among experts (and for advancing the careers of researchers), they are not aimed at laypeople. It's easy to misinterpret them if you lack the background knowledge.
Even in non-predatory journals many results fail to replicate and are produced due to a publish or perish pressure. You're better off learning from textbooks so you get info that has been verified, digested and distilled and represent consensus. Cutting edge research proposes new ideas by one group of authors, it's not a consensus yet.
> You're better off learning from textbooks so you get info that has been verified, digested and distilled and represent consensus.
A very large body of consensus ended up in textbooks that had either never been attempted te be reproduced, or was attempted, much later, and couldn't be reproduced, yet continued to remain in textbooks.
The truth of the matter is that most scientific research will never see an attempt at replication, though the replication crisis has no doubt influenced this culture, but before it, as little as 0.16% of peer reviewed results were attempts at replication, and most were unsuccessful. — of course, the successful ones were not as easily published, which is probably why no one attempted it.
That may happen in exceptional cases, but less so for sciences with more concrete results. To learn about human psychology and society perhaps you're better off reading great novels than p-hacked sexy "research".
Regarding replication... Replication is boring in the eyes of funding committees. They want new and sexy results for their money, preferably at a steady rate of a bunch of papers each year.
But you still have to look at the individual paper and can't believe it just based on a single article. Research articles are for sharing results among experts (and for advancing the careers of researchers), they are not aimed at laypeople. It's easy to misinterpret them if you lack the background knowledge.
Even in non-predatory journals many results fail to replicate and are produced due to a publish or perish pressure. You're better off learning from textbooks so you get info that has been verified, digested and distilled and represent consensus. Cutting edge research proposes new ideas by one group of authors, it's not a consensus yet.