30 years of the Journal of Heuristics: a bibliometric analysis

The Journal of Heuristics is an international journal that provides a forum to solve complex problems using heuristic solution tools. The journal was created in 1995, and in 2025, celebrates its 30th anniversary. Motivated by this special event, this article presents a bibliometric analysis of the journal. The article examines the journal publication and citation structure using the Scopus database, considering a wide range of issues including the most cited documents, productive authors, institutions, and countries. The work also develops a graphical visualization of the bibliographic data by using the VOS viewer software. This approach is studied with different bibliometric measures such as bibliographic coupling, co-citation, and co-occurrence of keywords. The results show that the Journal of Heuristics has maintained a solid quality of its publications over the years. Currently, the most popular topics are connected to heuristics, metaheuristics, local search, and tabu search. Researchers from the USA are the most productive. But countries such as France, the UK, Spain and Canada, have also a significant productivity in the journal.