Nurses are frequently exposed to death, dying patients and patients with incurable diseases, which are regarded as the major causes of occupational stress for nurses. As the main characteristic of job stress, burnout is a delayed reaction to chronic workplace stressors. This paper reports a literature review examining factors associated with job burnout of nurses. Electronic literature searches were carried out to identify the relevant published studies. Our literature search was limited to English and Persian databases. We searched ISI Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Magiran, SID and IranMedex from their inception to the end of October 2014. In addition, the references of articles retrieved were searched for additional citations. The search yielded 548 articles, 37 of which met the inclusion criteria. An additional 8 articles were identified from the bibliographies of retrieved papers. The results showed different rates of burnout in nurses in various countries. According to the findings, the most common workplace stressors for nurses include nurses' limited control over their own career, lack of autonomy, exposure to workplace interpersonal conflicts, lack of adequate support, exposure to death and dying patients, displacement in different hospital wards with patients who are in need of different levels of care, lack of essential resources and heavy nursing workloads. Given that the prevalence of job burnout in nurses varies between different hospital wards, further studies are required to comprehensively evaluate the factors associated with burnout in nurses.