Objectives: This review aims to determine the best available evidence regarding the effectiveness of concept map on nursing students critical thinking. Background: Concept map has shown positive impact on enhancing critical thinking skills in studies. Health care providers are required to have problem-solving and decision making ability in order to offer safe and high quality of care. However, traditional nursing education without diverse teaching and learning strategies is no longer to cultivate students abilities that are necessitated to deal with complex clinical situation and decision-making. Design: Systematic review. Methods: Search of PubMed, CINAHL, Medline and Cochrane database were conducted for data collection. This search was limited to articles published in English between 1999 to 2009 focusing on terms as concept map, concept mapping, mind map, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, nursing, nursing education, and nursing student. 6 articles fit with the inclusive criteria were critically appraised independently by two reviewers. The articles include: 4 quasi-experimental studies and 2 RCT studies. Results: Three studies indicated the intervention of using concept map significantly improved critical thinking core in nursing students, and two studies revealed that using concept map increased students knowledge retention and critical thinking scores on the areas of analysis and evaluation. One study indicated concept map improved their problem-solving ability. Conclusions: Concept map helps health care providers to identify main ideas, realize relationships of cause and effect, relationships of parts and whole in a logical way, and connect theory and practice, which are essential contributors to build critical thinking. However, there is a lack of randomized controlled trials (RCT) in this review, and variations of the interventions using concept map might affect the result of the review. Further RCT studies are needed to confirm the effectiveness of concept map on critical thinking in nursing students.