nitpicking

adjective

informal

nurses can be driven spare by the nitpicking hierarchies in hospitals:

pedantic, overscrupulous, scrupulous, precise, exact, over-exacting, perfectionist, precisionist, punctilious, meticulous, fussy, fastidious, finical, finicky;

dogmatic, purist, literalist, literalistic, formalist, scholastic;

casuistic, casuistical, sophistic, sophistical;

captious, hairsplitting, quibbling, pettifogging, fault-finding, hypercritical, cavilling, carping;

British, informal pernickety;

North American, informal persnickety;

archaic overnice.