The concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) has gained a great amount of public popularity and business attention in the past two decades. EI is currently considered a broadly recognized practitioner instrument for hiring, training, leadership development, and team building by the business people. In this context, the analysis of the evolution and development of this concept is crucial. In order to do so, this study presents the global research trends in EI area. The article presents a bibliometric analysis of 4297 journal articles on EI. These works come from the Scopus database for the period 1966-2018. The study sorts these articles according to the following bibliographic indicators: journal with most published research, highly cited articles, countries with the highest rate of productivity, prolific authors, year of publication, language, and research area. Besides, the study graphically maps the bibliographic material by using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software. In order to do so, the work uses co-authorship among authors and affiliated countries, and co-occurrence of author keywords. Results have shown that since 2005, the number of publications has increased exponentially, resulting in the steady increase in the cumulative total publications until present. The United States (US) is the most productive country. Also, among the most productive university from each of the 15 leading countries, three were amongst the world’s top 100 universities. The prominent authors were Petrides, Konstantinos V. and Extremera Pacheco, Natalio. whereas the top journals were the Personality and Individual Differences, Frontiers in Psychology and Life Science Journal. A network visualisation map showed that ‘emotional intelligence’, ‘emotions’ and ‘personality’ were the most encountered key terms. Therefore, this paper serves as a platform for the new researchers to refer concerning which journals, authors and articles they may consult while establishing the future research direction.

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