Discussion about a new specialist journal began in 1973 at a Southern Neurosurgical Society meeting, held in New Orleans, Louisiana.

For the next three years, negotiations took place to either purchase an existing journal or start a new one.

[1] President Robert G. Ojemann made the announcement of its launch at the 26th Annual Meeting of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons on October 27, 1976[2] and the inaugural issue of Neurosurgery was published in July 1977 as a bimonthly publication.

[3] The magazine in recent years is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

In May 2010, the international podcast series was introduced with article abstracts from the current issue translated and read in eight languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian).