Figure 1.
Flow diagram of study selection.
Figure 2.
Forest plot of Hazard ratio (HR) for survival of gastric cancer patients.
Highly significant heterogeneity can be found before Vallbohmer D’ study was excluded.
Figure 3.
Funnel plots were used to detect publication bias on overall estimate.
Studies are distributed symmetrically, and suggest that publication bias is absence in the meta-analysis.