This systematic review employed bibliometric methods to examine the meta-data of 244 documents on principal well-being during 61 years starting from its birth in 1962 to 2022. This review aimed at summarising the descriptive trends, identifying the most influential and popular themes and uncovering its underlying intellectual structure on principal well-being. Citation and author co-citation analysis was also applied in this review. The combination of the descriptive and bibliometric techniques with a large corpus of scientific outputs allows broader overviews but deeper insights into the past, present and future of the knowledge production and evolution of principal well-being literature. This bibliometric review provides 'high ground' signposts on the historical path of intellectual accumulation of principal well-being literature using a far larger corpus of publications than previous reviews.