ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that reviews can explore as well as answer questions and, further, the questions that emerge from a review can be as important and interesting as those that are answered. Nurse reviewers ask questions that are answerable and unanswerable in principle using empiric or scientific methods. Nurses, like other healthcare professionals, rightly concern themselves with ethically laden and evaluative questions, and a great deal of student effort and published research explores this type of issue. A great deal of explanation will be required before nurses can establish how evaluative and normatively charged questions can best be pursued in literature reviews, and the use of humanity and arts-based resources is no less problematic for practitioners wishing to ground practice on ‘evidence’. From the perspective of an educator, disaggregating reviews into a succession of teachable moments and gradable skills is helpful.
