Objective To evaluate the diagnostic value of ELISA using AgB in cystic echinococcosis (CE). Methods Such databases as PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library, EBSCO, CBM, CNKI, WanFang Data and MedaLink were retrieved on computer, and the relevant journals were also manually searched to collect the trials on ELISA using AgB in diagnosis of CE. The retrieval time was from inception to July 5th, 2012. Two reviewers independently screened the literature, extracted the data and assessed the quality according to QUADAS. Then the meta-analysis was conducted by using Meta-Disc 1.4 software. Results A total of 8 studies were included, and there were 562 CE patients diagnosed by gold standard, 434 suspected cases and 303 healthy people. There were no threshold effects among those 8 studies (the spearman’s correlation coefficient of log sensitivity to log 1-specificity was 0.527, P=0.400 1). The meta-analysis of DerSimonia-Laird showed that, the pooled sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio, negative likelihood ratio and diagnostic odds ratio was 0.76 (95%CI 0.73 to 0.79), 0.84 (95%CI 0.82 to 0.86), 5.20 (95%CI 3.59 to 7.55), 0.26 (95%CI 0.18 to 0.35), 23.93 (95%CI 12.35 to 46.39), respectively. And the AUC of SROC was 0.889 7 (Q=0.820 4). Conclusion ELISA using natural AgB and rAgB has greater diagnostic value in detecting CE.