Objective: To combine lymph node ratio (LNR) with central lymph node metastasis (CnLNs) to construct modified lymph node ratio (mLNR), and then investigated the impact mLNR had on prognosis of patients with gastric cancer. Methods: Chi-square analysis was performed to analyze the differences between groups of CnLNs- and CnLNs+ gastric cancer patients, Cox regression analysis was performed to analyze the factors affecting the survival of gastric cancer patients, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was constructed to determine the cut-off value of LNR classification, Kaplan-Meier curve was drawn to visually analyze the survival of gastric cancer patients, and nomogram was constructed to predict the survival and prognosis of gastric cancer patients. Results: Way of gastrectomy (P =0.042), tumor size (P =0.043), degree of differentiation (P =0.001), vascular invasion (P <0.001), neural invasion (P <0.001), T stage (P =0.001) and N stage (P <0.001), CEA (P =0.002) and CA199 (P =0.026) were significantly different between the two groups. Both LNR and CnLNs were able to distinguish the survival of gastric cancer patients, but LNR seemed more effective than CnLNs. In addition, mLNR could well predict the survival of patients with gastric cancer and was an independent risk factor affecting the survival of patients with gastric cancer. Conclusion: Utilizing CnLNs to construct mLNR was an independent risk factor for the survival of gastric cancer patients and was expected to be a novel prognostic indicator for patients with gastric cancer.