Gastric cancer (GC) remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide and there is therefore a clear need to search for more sensitive early diagnostic biomarkers. We performed a systematic review of eight published miRNA profiling studies that compared GC tissues with adjacent noncancerous tissues. A miRNA ranking system was used that took the frequency of comparisons, direction of differential expression and total sample size into consideration. We identified five miRNAs that were most consistently reported to be upregulated (miR-21, miR-106b, miR-17, miR-18a and miR-20a) and two miRNAs that were downregulated (miR-378 and miR-638). Six of these were further validated in 32 paired sets of GC and adjacent noncancerous tissue samples using real-time PCR. MiR-21, miR-106b, miR-17, miR-18a and miR-20a were confirmed to be upregulatedin GC tissues, while the expression of miR-378 was decreased. Moreover, we found a significant association between expression levels of miR-21, miR-106b, miR-17, miR-18a and miR-20a and clinicopathological features of GC. These miRNAs may be used for diagnostic and/or prognostic biomarkers for GC and therefore warrant further investigation.