Nitrate, due to its high water solubility, is possibly the most widespread groundwater contaminant in the world, imposing a serious threat to human health and contributing to eutrophication. Among several treatment technologies applied for nitrate removal, adsorption has been explored widely and offers satisfactory results especially with mineral-based and/or surface modified adsorbents. In this review, an extensive list of various sorbents from the literature has been compiled and their adsorption capacities for nitrate removal as available in the literature are presented along with highlighting and discussing the key advancement on the preparation of novel adsorbents tested for nitrate removal. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.