Reproducibility analyses of biologically relevant microarray studies have mostly focused on overlap of detected biomarkers or correlation of differential expression evidences across studies. For clinical utility, direct inter-study prediction (i.e. to establish a prediction model in one study and apply to another) for disease diagnosis or prognosis prediction is more important. Normalization plays a key role for such a task. Traditionally, sample-wise normalization has been a standard for inter-array and inter-study normalization. For gene-wise normalization, it has been implemented for intra-study or inter-study predictions in a few papers while its rationale, strategy and effect remain unexplored.