A bibliometric analysis was performed on a total of 1319 articles and reviews on rice and irrigation from the ‘Agronomy’ category based on the Web of Science (WoS) during the period 1965–2018. The results showed that the number of publications had grown rapidly over the past years, and English was the dominating language (96.437%). The top five most productive authors were E. Humphreys (Philippines), B. A. M. Bouman (Philippines), S. Fukai (Australia), J. Z. Xu (China) and A. Kumar (India). There were 98 core journals involved in publication; Agricultural Water Management was the most productive journal with 273 articles (20.697%), followed by Field Crops Research (176; 13.343%) and Paddy and Water Environment (162; 12.282%), each with more than 150 papers. India was the most productive country with 313 articles (23.73%), followed by China (218, 16.53%), USA (163, 12.36%), Philippines (154, 11.68%), Japan (152, 11.52%) and Australia (121, 9.17%). Among the institutions working on rice and irrigation, the top 3 were International Rice Research Institute, Philippines, Punjab Agricultural University, Pakistan and Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. Among 13 ESI top papers, there was one hot paper and four review papers.