Abstract: Based on literatures of agricultural modernization from the Web of Science database during 1998-2018, and applying the CiteSpace V software and method of the Mapping Knowledge Domains, including keywords co-occurrence analysis, document co-citation analysis and bursts analysis, this paper conducted a literature review of agricultural modernization over the world and examined its intellectual base, emerging trends, and research fronts. Results reveals that there exist remarkable regional characteristics in world agricultural modernization research with European countries being one step ahead in the research of knowledge-intensive agricultural systems, and developing countries focusing more on the transition from subsistence agriculture to market-oriented agriculture. Several important topics, including food security, modernization of irrigation, “three-Ag” issues, ecological modernization of agriculture and agricultural value chain, contribute to the intellectual base of agricultural modernization. And the research fronts of agricultural modernization mainly relies on topics like land consolidation, modernization of agricultural value chain, sustainable intensification, food sovereignty, animal and plant infectious diseases and food security, biodiversity-based agriculture, and agricultural water productivity. Results also illustrated the emerging trends of paying more attention on ecological modernization of agriculture and rural prosperity, which changed from previous focusing on conventional agriculture and how to eliminate its negative externalities. Therefore, in the future, China’s agricultural modernization should expand and deepen its contemporary connotation in the prosperity of rural and agricultural communities and in transforming modern agriculture. While focusing on industrial agriculture, agricultural modernization research should attach importance to the development and growth of alternative agricultural systems and support the formation of a common development pattern of multiple agriculture systems, which require China’s research on agricultural modernization to absorb its traditional agricultural practical experiences and drawn on the experience on agroecological transition of European and American countries for innovating the forms of agricultural ecological modernization, and walking out a path of agricultural ecological modernization with Chinese characteristics.