It is of great significance to grasp the development trend of agricultural economics from much information. Based on ESI subject evaluation concept,this paper extracted 3 722 highly-cited papers on the agricultural economics subject (1998-2017) by means of crawler technology from the back-end of CNKI,and explored the hot topics,development sequence and trend of the subject’s research by literature measurement method. The findings indicate that: (1) In this period,domestic agricultural economics mainly focused on five hot topics,namely coordination of “three modernizations” and rural development,rural land management,food security and farmland protection,land system change and rural social security,land system change and rural social security,and rural e-commerce; (2) In terms of development sequence,it has experienced the stages emphasizing the macro-agricultural environment,the micro mechanism of agriculture,the consolidation of agricultural foundation and the reform of agricultural system; (3) It’s predicted that issues like targeted poverty alleviation,new agricultural operation entities,urbanization and the development of “agriculture,rural areas and farmers”,rural e-commerce,land circulation and sustainable agricultural development will be the focus of agricultural economics research in the next few years.