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Objective To evaluate the clinical efficacy of sodium hyaluronate in the treatment of knee osteoarthritis. Methods There are three ways of expressions for the term "knee osteoarthritis" in Chinese: "xiguanjie guxing guanjieyan", "xigu guanjieyan", and "xiguxing guanjieyan". Any combination of each of the above expressions and " sodium hyaluronate " used as keywords, the clinical research literatures on knee osteoarthritis between January 1993 and December 2013 were retrieved from Chinese HowNet, WanFang DATA and VIP database, and then all literatures were analyzed using Meta-analysis. Results Total of 392 literatures were retrieved, and 7 literatures were selected by screening ultimately involving 743 patients. The analysis results of the 7 literatures showed clinical efficacy in the treatment group was superior to that in the control group (Z = 5.46, P < 0.01) . The bilateral symmetry of funnel plot suggested the language bias was less likely to exist, but the graphics were not inverted funnel-shaped which indicated that the low quality of clinical research. Conclusion It has a good curative effect to treat knee osteoarthritis with articular injection of sodium hyaluronate, which has certain advantages in comparison with other treatment methods. However, due to the restrictions of research quality and quantitative, the results need to be discussed further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]