The purpose of this study was to analyze research trends about emotional intelligence variables by investigating empirical articles published in Korea from 2000 to 2016. For this study, a keyword network analysis was conducted to analyze the structural relationships of the keyword in a total of 1045 articles. After the data cleansing process, the results of the analysis by extracting 907 different kinds of 2536 keyword as follows. The 334 papers which related to emotional intelligence were published in academic journals and have been steadily increasing since 2000. The main keyword were identified as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, emotional labor, creativity, and burnout in order. The results were follows. The whole network consisted of 89 components. Both degree centrality and betweenness centrality of creativity, job satisfaction, burnout were the highest but, the betweenness centrality of self-efficiency, sociality was highest. By conducting the additional network analysis about both degree centrality and betweenness centrality of creativity, job satisfaction, and burnout were presented the structure of each ego network and the characteristic of centrality. This research could explain research trends of emotional intelligence by the relational perspective and suggested the practical development for further research in field of HRD.