[1] It publishes research articles in statistical computing that are of interest to users of the R programming language.

It publishes regular news updates about The R Foundation, the CRAN repository system, and the Bioconductor project.

It also published articles foreshadowing new development directions for R.[2] The journal also publishes articles on best-practice and innovation in modelling, for example in multivariate statistics or multi-level modelling.

A feature of the journal is the inclusion in articles of complete code by which readers can reproduce results and examples.

[4] The following persons are or have been editors-in-chief: Vince Carey (2009), Peter Dalgaard (2010), Heather Turner (2011), Martyn Plummer (2012), Hadley Wickham (2013), Deepayan Sarkar (2014), Bettina Grün (2015), Michael Lawrence (2016), Roger Bivand (2017), John Verzani (2018), Norman Matloff (2019), Michael Kane (2020), Dianne Cook (2021), Catherine Hurley (2022), Simon Urbanek (2023), Mark van der Loo (2024) and Rob J. Hyndman (2025).