The present investigation was carried out with the purpose of publicizing how emotional intelligence contributes to academic performance; posing as a research question: What is the impact of emotional intelligence in improving academic performance in university students in the last five years?; Due to this, the methodology used for this purpose was qualitative, basic and a review of articles published in the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases; following a search protocol, collection, extraction, analysis and selection of articles under the eligibility criteria: academic publications with SJR (Scimago Journal Rank) impact indicators and publications in Spanish and English. For the analysis of the review, 79 articles were selected and after filtering, only 10 articles met the inclusion and exclusion criteria as part of the review. The results show that there is a limited number of publications that have specified emotional intelligence as a predictor of academic performance in university students.