The catalogue was published in 1959 by members of the Radio Astronomy Group of the University of Cambridge.

The interferometer had previously been used for the Second Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources (2C) survey, published in 1955.

The catalogue was subsequently revised by Bennett in 1962 using observations at 178 MHz, and for many years '3CR' was considered as the definitive listing of the brighter radio sources in the Northern Hemisphere.

A further revision by R.A. Laing, Julia Riley and Malcolm Longair in 1983, called 3CRR or 3CR², included galaxies which were not detected in the original catalogue due to shortcomings of the original observations, but which otherwise meet the flux and declination limits.

It excludes a number of well-known 3C/3CR objects, including all the supernova remnants from 3C, but also some well-known radio galaxies that lie outside the declination, flux density or galactic latitude constraints.