Journal of Neurocytology

About Journal of Neurocytology

Journal of Neurocytology — Journal Profile

The Journal of Neurocytology was a specialist neuroscience journal published from 1972 to 2005, devoted to the study of the nervous system at the cellular level — neurons, glia, synapses, myelin and the fine structure that electron microscopy and related methods reveal. It carried print ISSN 0300-4864 and online ISSN 1573-7381, was published for most of its life by Kluwer Academic Press and later within the Springer publishing group (today presented under Springer Nature), and in 2006 it continued under a new title, Brain Cell Biology, which itself ceased in 2008. The journal no longer accepts submissions; its importance today is as a large, citable archive of classical cellular neuroscience. This profile explains what it published, how its history and ISSNs fit together — including a correction to the ISSN list attached to this record — and how researchers should use its legacy literature.

Quick Facts

History: From Bimonthly Specialist to Monthly, Then a New Title

The journal began in 1972, in the period when electron microscopy had transformed the study of nerve cells and a dedicated outlet for cellular-level nervous system research had a clear purpose. For its first eighteen years it appeared bimonthly. In 1990 it moved to monthly publication, and it remained monthly until it ended under this title in 2005 — a thirty-three year run that produced the core archive neuroscientists still cite.

The ending was a renaming and relaunch rather than a simple closure. In 2006 the journal continued as Brain Cell Biology, with a new editor-in-chief, George J. Augustine, and new ISSNs (1559-7105 and 1559-7113). That successor was short-lived: it published from 2006 to 2008, and Augustine's closing editorial in its final issue in December 2008 — titled, after the Beatles song he quoted, in the spirit of hello and goodbye — marked the end of the combined lineage that had begun on 1 July 1972. With the inclusion of the successor, the publication family therefore spans 1972–2008, but the Journal of Neurocytology title itself is strictly 1972–2005, and citations must respect that boundary: an article from 2007 is a Brain Cell Biology article, not a Journal of Neurocytology article, however continuous the subject matter feels.

An Important ISSN Correction to This Record

The structured ISSN list attached to this JournalsWorld record names four numbers: 0300-4864, 1559-7105, 1559-7113 and 1573-7381. Only two of them belong to the Journal of Neurocytology. Its own ISSNs are 0300-4864 (print) and 1573-7381 (online), as given in the National Library of Medicine cataloguing for the title (NLM catalog 0364620). The other two numbers, 1559-7105 and 1559-7113, are the print and online ISSNs of the successor, Brain Cell Biology (2006–2008). The four-number list appears to have merged a journal with its successor during data import. Readers recording this journal should cite the two-number pair for 1972–2005 material, and librarians correcting the record should move the 1559 pair to the successor title. This profile flags the conflict rather than repeating the merged list as if all four ISSNs were this journal's own.

Scope: The Nervous System at Cellular Level

Neurocytology is the study of the cells of the nervous system — their structure, organisation and relationships — and the journal was its dedicated international outlet. Its published subject matter, as characterised in reference summaries of the title, centred on the neuron and its parts and partners, including in particular the axon, the Schwann cell, myelin and the synaptic vesicle. Unpacked, the scope covered:

Neuronal fine structure

Ultrastructure of the cell body, dendrites and axon; cytoskeleton — neurofilaments, microtubules and associated proteins; axonal transport; growth cones; and the structural specialisations of different neuronal types across the central and peripheral nervous systems.

Synapses and synaptic vesicles

The presynaptic terminal, vesicle pools and release sites, postsynaptic densities, synaptic plasticity at the structural level, and the molecular anatomy of synaptic junctions — the journal was a natural home for work that connected electron-microscope images with synaptic function.

Glia, Schwann cells and myelin

Astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells; myelin formation, structure and breakdown; glial-neuronal relationships; and the cellular pathology of demyelinating conditions. Schwann cell and myelin work is specifically named in descriptions of the journal, reflecting a real strand of its contents rather than a generic neuroscience claim.

Neural development, injury and regeneration at cellular level

How neurons and their connections form, how they respond to injury — sprouting, reactive synaptogenesis and regeneration, as in the organ-of-Corti culture studies the journal published — and how cellular organisation changes in disease models.

Methods for cellular neuroscience

Electron microscopy, immunocytochemistry, tract tracing and tissue culture of nervous tissue, where the methodological advance was itself the contribution. A pictorial history of the neuronal cytoskeleton published in the neuroscience literature draws heavily on exactly this era of imaging work, much of it published in journals of this type.

The boundary of the scope is equally clear: clinical neurology without a cellular component, systems and cognitive neuroscience, and molecular genetics with no cell-structure dimension were outside its centre of gravity, even when they appeared at its edges. That narrowness was the point — for three decades, an author with a fine-structure result on nervous tissue knew precisely which journal's readers would understand it.

Character of the Literature It Leaves Behind

The archive is dominated by primary research articles reporting microscopy-led and cell-biological studies, together with reviews that summarised fast-moving structural topics. Because the journal's era spans the maturation of modern cellular neuroscience, its backfile is cited in two ways today. First, as primary evidence: original descriptions of structures, terminals, myelin organisation and culture systems that later work builds on, with the advantage that the papers show the images on which their claims rest. Second, as historical record: the journal documents how the field's picture of the neuron was assembled, which is why histories of the neuronal cytoskeleton and of synaptic organisation cite its papers decades later. Its SCImago-derived h-index, reported at 79, is consistent with that long citation tail: ceased journals stop growing, but a heavily used archive keeps being cited, and its metrics should be read as archive indicators, not as signs of current activity.

Publisher and Succession, Stated Precisely

The journal was a Kluwer Academic Press title for most of its life. Kluwer's academic publishing business became part of Springer, which is why the archive is reached today through Springer's platform and why this record names Springer Nature as publisher — that attribution is correct for the archive's present custodian and for the journal's final period, and incomplete if read as the publisher of the 1970s volumes. The successor, Brain Cell Biology (2006–2008), was a Springer title from its start. Library catalogues capture this chain in their own way — the combined family's first publication is recorded as 1 July 1972 and its last as 1 December 2008 — and any catalogue record that gives the Journal of Neurocytology a 2006–2008 date has folded the successor into the predecessor, the same merging error seen in this record's ISSN list.

Using This Journal Today: Authors, Readers and Librarians

There are no submissions. The journal ceased in 2005 and its successor ceased in 2008; any website inviting a new submission to the Journal of Neurocytology, or offering to publish in it for a fee, should be treated as misusing a ceased title's name, and authors should verify a journal's live status on the publisher's own platform before paying anyone anything.

For readers and citing authors: cite the article under the title in force when it appeared — Journal of Neurocytology to 2005, Brain Cell Biology from 2006 — with the volume and pages as printed, and prefer the publisher's archive copy for figures, where microscopy plates reproduce at usable quality. When a citation's ISSN is needed, use 0300-4864 / 1573-7381 for this title.

For librarians: hold the two titles as linked but separate records, with the ISSN pairs kept apart as set out above; holdings statements that merge them produce exactly the four-ISSN confusion flagged in this profile.

For researchers choosing a modern home for similar work: the journal's niche — cellular and structural neuroscience — is now served by general neuroscience and cell-biology journals and by Springer's current neuroscience list; the correct comparison is by scope and readership, not by trying to revive this title's name.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the correct ISSNs of the Journal of Neurocytology?

0300-4864 (print) and 1573-7381 (online). The numbers 1559-7105 and 1559-7113 that also appear in this record's structured list belong to its successor, Brain Cell Biology.

When was it published?

1972–2005: bimonthly from 1972 to 1990, then monthly to 2005.

Who published it?

Kluwer Academic Press for most of its life; the title later sat within Springer, and its archive is held by Springer Nature today.

What happened to it after 2005?

It continued as Brain Cell Biology from 2006 to 2008, under editor-in-chief George J. Augustine, and then ceased entirely; the combined family spans 1972–2008.

What did it publish?

Cellular neuroscience: neuronal fine structure, axons, synapses and synaptic vesicles, Schwann cells and myelin, glia, neural development and injury at cellular level, and the microscopy and culture methods behind that work.

Can I submit a paper to it?

No. It is a ceased journal. Treat any offer of submission in its name as a warning sign and check the publisher's platform instead.

Verification Checklist for Readers

• Use the ISSN pair 0300-4864 / 1573-7381 for the 1972–2005 title; reserve 1559-7105 / 1559-7113 for Brain Cell Biology.
• Date-check citations against the title boundary: 2005 and earlier, Journal of Neurocytology; 2006–2008, Brain Cell Biology.
• Confirm cataloguing against the NLM record (catalog 0364620) or the publisher's archive.
• Read any metric for this title as an archive metric for a ceased journal.

Strands of the Archive Worth Knowing

The organ of Corti and auditory neurocytology

One of the archive's distinctive strands is the cellular study of the inner ear. Work by Sobkowicz and collaborators, published in the journal across the 1970s to the 1990s, used organotypic cultures of the mouse organ of Corti to follow how auditory hair cells and their innervation develop, sprout and reorganise after injury — including studies of terminal dendritic sprouting and reactive synaptogenesis, and of the kinocilium of auditory hair cells and its role in the regeneration of stereocilia. These papers are still cited in the successor journal's literature, where later work on auditory system structure continued the line. They illustrate the journal at its best: a defined preparation, patient microscopy, and conclusions about cellular organisation that could not have been reached by physiology alone.

The neuronal cytoskeleton in pictures

A widely read pictorial history of the neuronal cytoskeleton, published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2021, traces how staining methods, culture preparations and electron microscopy successively revealed microtubules, the axonal growth cone and dendritic spines — and its imagery and references lean on the classical literature of journals such as this one, including drawings and micrographs from the era when George Gray, Ray Guillery, Victoria Chan-Palay and Radivoj Krstić were defining how neuronal fine structure was pictured. Reading that history alongside the Journal of Neurocytology's backfile shows why the archive remains a teaching resource: it holds the primary images behind textbook diagrams that are still in use.

Prefrontal cortex and the journal's wider reach

Although cellular in title, the journal also carried work that connected cellular organisation to brain function at a higher level — for example Joaquín Fuster's 2002 paper on the frontal lobe and cognitive development, published in its pages. Such papers mark the journal's outer boundary: the argument could range widely, but it remained anchored in the neuronal and cellular organisation of the tissue concerned. Authors mining the archive for a topic should therefore search beyond narrow microscopy keywords; some of its most cited conceptual papers are shelved, as it were, between the ultrastructure studies.

Methods Era: What the Papers Can and Cannot Show

Interpreting a 1970s or 1980s paper from this archive requires an honest sense of its methods era. The early volumes predate modern immunolabelling panels, genetic markers, live-cell imaging and high-resolution volumetric electron microscopy. Their evidence is the evidence of classical electron microscopy, Golgi-style staining, tract tracing and tissue culture, interpreted by anatomists who knew the tissue intimately. That evidence is strong on structure — what connects to what, what a terminal contains, how myelin is organised — and necessarily limited on molecular identity, where a modern reader must pair the classical description with later molecular work. The right way to cite the archive is accordingly twofold: cite it as authority for the structural facts it established, and cite newer literature for the molecular mechanisms that the classical authors could describe only morphologically. Used that way, the old papers are not outdated; they are the foundation layer of the subject's evidence.

The Successor's Brief Life, and Why It Matters for Citations

Brain Cell Biology's three years (2006–2008) are disproportionately visible in the record because its ending was documented by its own editor. Augustine's closing editorial reflected on a journal that was, in his words, saying goodbye just as it was starting to say hello to its audience, and its October 2008 special issue on optogenetic probes of neuronal function and circuitry — tools that control or detect neuronal activity with light — was presented as a landmark for that emerging field. The successor thus ended on a forward-looking topic that would become central to neuroscience, which is one reason its small archive is still encountered. For citation practice the lesson is mechanical but important: 2006–2008 papers in this lineage carry Brain Cell Biology's name, its ISSNs (1559-7105 / 1559-7113) and its DOI pattern, and recording them under Journal of Neurocytology corrupts both titles' records — the same corruption, in miniature, that produced the four-ISSN list flagged at the top of this profile.

How the Archive Is Organised for Retrieval

Retrieval follows the combined family's chronology. The Journal of Neurocytology's volumes run from 1972 to 2005, bimonthly at first and monthly from 1990, so a monthly-era year contains more, thinner issues than a bimonthly-era year — a point that matters when a citation gives only a volume and page: volume numbering, not the calendar, is the stable key. The publisher's archive presents the title and its successor as a connected family, and library catalogues record the family's full span as 1 July 1972 to 1 December 2008. Search strategies that work well against this archive combine the journal title or its abbreviation, J. Neurocytol., with anatomical terms at cellular level — a named nucleus or cortical layer plus terms such as ultrastructure, synapse, terminal, myelin or Schwann — because the papers' own vocabulary is anatomical first and molecular second.

A Note on Names and Abbreviations in Reference Lists

Reference lists abbreviate this journal as J. Neurocytol., under the standard title-abbreviation system recorded in its cataloguing. Searchers should try both the full title and that abbreviation, because older reference lists, scanned bibliographies and some databases use one form exclusively. The successor is abbreviated Brain Cell Biol. Keeping the two abbreviations apart in a search — and noticing which one a citing paper actually used — is often the fastest way to date a citation and to decide which of the two titles' archives to open.

Profile prepared from the journal's cataloguing record (NLM), reference histories of the title and its successor Brain Cell Biology (including the successor's closing editorial of December 2008), and SCImago-derived summaries. The four-ISSN list in this site's structured fields conflicts with those sources and is corrected above, with the conflict flagged for the record owner.