It covers empirical research on all aspects of neuroscience.

Its editor-in-chief is Sabine Kastner (Princeton University), who succeeded Marina Picciotto (Yale University) in 2024.

[1] The journal was established in 1981 and issues appeared monthly; as its popularity grew it switched to a biweekly schedule in 1996 and then to a weekly in July 2003.

In 2004, it added the Neurobiology of Disease section due to the growing number of papers on this subject.

[2] In addition, some issues of the journal contain articles in the following sections: