Introduction:

While producing their postgraduate thesis, students get closer to researching activities and acquire diverse competencies in their discipline fields. The analysis of these trends allows a better identification of the decisions related to areas of opportunity and the development of scientific knowledge.

Objective:

To identify the characteristics of the thesis works produced by graduate students from the Masters in Nursing and the Specialty Nursing programs.

Methods:

This is a retrospective, transversal, and descriptive study. 144 thesis works submitted during the period 2013-2018 were analyzed. The degree of correspondence between the topics presented in the submitted works and the current Lines of Generation and Application of Knowledge (LGAK) was assessed.

Results:

The topics related to management had a correspondence of 91.7% with the management LGAK; the topics related to older adult in critical status attention had a correspondence of 86% with the institutional integral attention LGAK, and regarding the Masters in Nursing program specifically, a 51.1% correspondence was found with the topics of healthcare and health promotion. The main objects of study were: the performance of the nursing personnel (52.8%); the knowledge of nursing professionals (60%); and the quality of the attention (32%). 91% of the thesis works followed a quantitative approach, with 88.9% being observational.

Discussion:

The results suggest the need to consider enhancing the scope of researching formation among both the students and academic staff in this postgraduate program.

Conclusion:

The topics addressed in the submitted works showed sufficient correspondence with the objectives of the programs. The most frequently used methodological approach was the quantitative-observational. Nursing studies focused on interventions to improve the situations which both patients and health professionals face were the most prevalent.