Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide, with high incidence in Asia . For patients with resectable GC, surgery and adjuvant chemoradiotherapy are the main way to cure this malignance. However, many patients still suffered recurrence and metastasis, though they received standard treatments. The concept of cancer stem cells (CSCs) has been put forward to explain the cause of therapy resistance and many studies have discovered that CSCs might play a pivotal role in tumor recurrence and metastasis [2, 3]. Meanwhile, some specific markers or their combinations have also been demonstrated valuable in identifying CSCs. These specific markers might be the key points in target therapy and prognostic prediction. From previous studies, we found that intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (CD54), leucine rich repeat containing G protein coupled receptor 5 (Lgr5), prominin 1 (CD133), POU class 5 homeobox 1 (Oct4), epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM) and sex determining region Y-box 2 (Sox2) were demonstrated as the putative markers of CSCs in many kinds of tumors [4–6]. The relationship between these markers and clinicopathological characteristics and the prognostic significance of these markers have been investigated in GC [7, 8]. However, many studies only focused on several of these six markers and the results were still controversial. Therefore, the significance of these markers were still under debate and should be further demonstrated.