The International Journal of Intelligent Systems was created in 1986. Today, the journal is 30 years old. To celebrate this anniversary, this study develops a bibliometric review of all of the papers published in the journal between 1986 and 2015. The results are largely based on the Web of Science Core Collection, which classifies leading bibliographic material by using several indicators including total number of publications and citations, the h‐index, cites per paper, and citing articles. The work also uses the VOS viewer software for visualizing the main results through bibliographic coupling and co‐citation. The results show a general overview of leading trends that have influenced the journal in terms of highly cited papers, authors, journals, universities and countries.