Objective To systematically review the prognostic and clinicopathological value of plasma fibrinogen in renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Methods An electronic search of the PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library (Issue 5, 2016), CNKI, CBM and WanFang Data databases was performed to collect cohort studies about the prognostic value of plasma fibrinogen in RCC from inception to May 2016. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies. Then meta-analysis was performed by using RevMan 5.3 software. Results A total of 3 744 RCC patients from 7 cohort studies were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that the lower plasma fibrinogen expression group was superior to the higher expression group in overall survival (HR=2.13, 95%CI 1.74 to 2.61,P<0.00 001) and cancer-specific survival (HR=3.12, 95%CI 2.19 to 4.44,P<0.00 001). Subgroup analysis showed that plasma fibrinogen expression was higher in stage Ⅲ to Ⅳ than stage ⅠtoⅡ (OR=0.27, 95%CI 0.13 to 0.55,P=0.000 3) and was higher in Fuhrman grading G3+G4 than grading G1+G2 (OR=0.49, 95%CI 0.40 to 0.59,P<0.000 01). However, the level of plasma fibrinogen was not found to be associated with gender (OR=0.85, 95%CI 0.69 to 1.05,P=0.14). Conclusion Current evidence shows plasma fibrinogen expression is associated with the prognostic and clinicopathological value of RCC. Due to limited quantity and quality of included studies, the above conclusions are still needed to be verified by more high quality studies.