Objective To investigate on the epidemiologic characteristics of nosocomial infection in surgery departments of general hospitals by analyzing the data collected from documents which were published in recent years, so as to provide references for the construction of precautionary system model. Methods Applying comprehensive search strategies, we searched various electronic databases as CBM (1978 to 2008), CNKI (1912 to 2008), VIP (2001 to 2009) and WanFang Data (2001 to 2009). MeSH terms and/or text words included: nosocomial infections, cross infection, hospital infection, prevent and control. Data from top and second grade hospital were included in this analysis. Results Sixty four articles and a total of 1 990 929 inpatients were included. Results showed: average nosocomial infection rate was 4.46%; the total rates of medicine department and surgery department were 23.28% and 17.33% respectively and no significant difference was found between the two departments; the infection rates of G– and G+ germ were 47.71% and 21.31% respectively; the rates of average antibiotics use was 60.59% and the rate of missing report was 12.42%. Noscomial infection was related to season change and the wave peak was from February to May. Conclusion Most of the included studies were retrospective studies and cross-sectional studies. The type of data was inconsistency and incomplete, causing weak strength of evidence. High missing rate of reports makes the precautionary model hard to build in future.