Objective To systematically evaluate the effects of magnesium sulfate on postoperative pain and complications after general anesthesia. Methods A literature search was conducted in following databases as The Cochrane Library, EMbase, PubMed, EBSCO, Springer, Ovid, CNKI and CBM from the date of establishment to September 2011 to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) about intravenous infusion of magnesium sulfate during general anesthesia. All included RCTs were assessed and the data were extracted according to the standard of Cochrane systematic review. The homogenous studies were pooled using RevMan 5.1 software. Results A total of 11 RCTs involving 905 patients were included. The results of meta-analyses showed that compared with the control group, intravenous infusion of magnesium sulfate during general anesthesia significantly reduced the visual analog scale (VAS) scores at the time-points of 2, 4, 6, 8, 16, and 24 hours, respectively, after surgery, the postoperative 24 hours morphine requirements, and the incidents of postoperative nausea and vomiting (RR=0.61, 95%CI 0.40 to 0.91, P=0.02) and chilling (RR=0.29, 95%CI 0.14 to 0.59, P=0.000 7). Although the incidents of bradycardia (RR=1.93, 95%CI 1.05 to 3.53, P=0.03) increased, there were no adverse events or significant differences in the incidents of hypotension and serum concentration changes of magnesium. Conclusion Intravenous infusion of magnesium sulfate during general anesthesia may obviously decrease the pain intensity, and the incidents of nausea and vomiting and chilling after surgery, without increasing cardiovascular adverse events and risk of hypermagnesemia. The results still need to be confirmed by more high-quality and large-sample RCTs.