Background Injury is one of the leading causes for deaths of adolescent at present, and injury in adolescent has become a major concern for international researchers. China Health Statistical Yearbook 2011 reported that injury has become the most prevalence cause of death for both urban and rural adolescents. In order to have a thorough understanding of current situation of adolescent injury, and to give scientific evidence in the future, this article tries to systematically estimate the incidence and to examine factors that contribute to the variations in incidence of adolescent injury among studies.

Methods The term “adolescent” in this study is strict to population aged between 10 and 19 years old. Wanfang, CNKI, EBSCO and PubMed Databases were searched for adolescent injury data, based on quantitative studies between 2005 and 2015. Meta-analysis was used to calculate the pooled size of effect and to identify the sources of variation using STATA Version 12.0.

Results A total of 71 articles using data from regional surveys were identified in the review. Results showed that the estimated injury number of people and person- time were 26.4% (95% CI: 21.8%–31.1%) and 24.0% (95% CI: 22.4 % −25.7%), respectively. Differences by gender and grade could be found. When summarising data of the past decade, it is found that the incidence of adolescent injury fluctuated, while recent years have witnessed a significant increase. The type occurred in adolescents with the highest frequency is falling.

Conclusions Male and middle school students are more vulnerable to get injured, which indicates close attention should be paid to those groups. Moreover, due to increasing incidence of injury during the past years, efficient monitoring and intervention should be taken into consideration for administrators and policy-makers.