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.
Themes
Main themes
Articles appear within one of the following five sections of the journal:
Cellular/Molecular
Development/Plasticity/Repair
Systems/Circuits
Behavioral/Cognitive
Neurobiology of Disease
The journal has revised its sections over the years. In 2004, it added the Neurobiology of Disease section due to the growing number of papers on this subject. In January 2013, the journal split the section Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive into two sections, Systems/Circuits and Behavioral/Cognitive, in order to make the sections of the journal approximately the same in size.[2]
Beginning February 2025, the journal permits submission of supplemental materials.[3]
Features
In addition, some issues of the journal contain articles in the following sections:
Brief Communications
Journal Club (brief reviews of articles that appeared in the Journal; written by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows; first published in September 2005)
