Objectives To assess the clinical effectiveness of laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK) versus laser epithelial keratomileusis (LASEK) for the correction of myopia. Methods Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) were searched in PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library (Issue 2, 2010), CNKI, VIP, and WangFang Data from January, 1990 to October, 2010. The RCTs were included in accordance with the Cochrane review’s methodology, the valid data were extracted, the quality was evaluated, and then the RevMan 5.0 software was used for statistical analyses. Results Seven RCTs involving 1 134 eyes with myopia were included. The results of meta-analyses showed that the efficacy (OR=1.23, 95%CI 0.73 to 2.07), accuracy (OR=1.73, 95%CI 0.74 to 2.53) and safety (OR=1.10, 95%CI 0.22 to 5.59) outcomes between LASIK and LASEK were comparable. Compared with LASIK, LASEK was higher in the incidence rate of postoperative eye pain (RR=0.13, 95%CI 0.08 to 0.22). Conclusion LASIK and LASEK have the same effectiveness for myopia, but LASEK induces more postoperative eye pains. A large number of strictly-designed multi-centred RCTs are required for further verifying this result because of the low quality and instable results of the included studies．