How to find the best journals or articles to read When someone is just starting out, they can be overwhelmed  with the number of journal articles published each month. Reading everything published seems impossible due to time constraints.

After someone has enough experience, they naturally watch for articles which are impressive, see where these are published and where the articles it cites are published but when someone is just starting out, it's not clear where to begin.

How does one go about identifying the best journals to keep up on when they have no experience reading any particular journal?
This depends on your field. In mathematics, physics, and a few related areas there is arXiv.org. From which you get rss feeds or e-mail announcements for individual research areas. This is particularly helpful because there are a huge amount a journals in mathematics and physics and you could never keep up with all of them. 

The added benefit is that most of what you run across on arXiv hasn't made it to a journal yet so it is relatively new and free. Then after you find useful and interesting articles you can keep track of them and find out where they were eventually published. 

Another set of tools that can be useful is a good indexing service that lets you trace backwards and forwards the references from a paper that you know is important. This lets you see not only what the important paper references but also who has referenced it and where they did so. 

Because of the fact that my research field does not yet have a single journal dedicated to my field these are the tools that I use most to find new literature and see what is going on. Of course if you are still looking around for a research field to get into there are the big general topic journals in each area which are a good place to start if you want a big picture.