A search for heavy, right-handed neutrinos,(N_{\ell} (\ell = e, \nu)), and right-handed (W_R) bosons, which arise in the left-right symmetric extensions of the standard model, has been performed by the CMS experiment. The search was based on a sample of two lepton plus two jet events collected in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb⁻¹. For models with strict left-right symmetry, and assuming only one (N_\ell) flavor contributes significantly to the WR decay width, the region in the two-dimensional ((M_{W_R}, M_{N_\ell})) mass plane excluded at a 95 % confidence level extends to approximately (M_{W_R})=3.0TeV and covers a large range of neutrino masses below the (W_R) boson mass, depending on the value of (M_{W_R}). This search significantly extends the ((M_{W_R}, M_{N_\ell})) exclusion region beyond previous results. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-014-3149-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.