My advisor wants me to turn my capstone into a systematic review?

Three weeks is tight but not impossible if your underlying search is already comprehensive. The core difference between an integrative and a systematic review mostly lives in how transparently you document and report what you did, so the leap is more about reformatting and tightening than redoing the literature hunt from scratch. Start by checking whether your existing methods section already covers the pieces PRISMA expects, namely a registered or pre-specified question, explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, a structured multi-database search with full syntax for at least two databases, a reproducible screening process with some form of independent dual screening, and a flow diagram showing numbers at identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion. If most of those boxes are already checked, you are essentially repackaging rather than redoing. Picture this: you already searched CINAHL, PubMed, and PsycINFO with a Boolean string, screened 180 records by title and abstract, pulled 45 full texts, and excluded 30 with reasons. The only real work to convert is drafting a protocol-style methods paragraph, creating the four-stage PRISMA flow diagram in a free template, adding a search-strategy appendix table, and inserting a risk-of-bias or quality appraisal table, since systematic reviews almost always require some appraisal tool like JBI or CASP. None of that changes your findings; it just makes the path to them auditable. Your advisor likely already knows your study list is solid and is nudging you toward a stronger publication-ready framing. Practically, block one of your three weeks to draft the new methods and figures while your analysis stays untouched, then use the next week to get a peer or your advisor to independently re-screen a 10 percent sample so you can honestly claim some form of duplicate screening. Reserve the final week for polishing, defending, and practicing the inevitable question about why you chose systematic over integrative. If dual screening feels unrealistic given the timeline, be upfront in your limitations that one reviewer conducted initial screening with a second verifying excluded studies, which is a common compromise in student work and is generally accepted for a capstone defense.