The integrated SMD and SROC curves for CESC, cervical adenocarcinoma and all types of cervical cancer samples from in-house tissue microarray, external microarrays and RNA-seq datasets confirmed PLK1 overexpression in CESC, cervical adenocarcinoma and all types of cervical cancer (SMD = 1.59, 95% CI [0.56–2.63]; SMD = 2.99, 95% CI [0.75–5.24]; SMD = 1.57, 95% CI [0.85–2.29]) as well as the exceptional ability of PLK1 overexpression to discriminate CESC or all types of cervical cancer samples from non-cancer samples (AUC = 0.94; AUC = 0.92) (Figs. 5–6). Here, PLK1 is linked to cervical adenocarcinoma.