Research should be at the core of all that nurses do – tradition and custom are no longer acceptable justifications for any action taken in clinical practice. It is now expected that everything nurses do is underpinned by the best available evidence. This does not mean that all nurses need to become accomplished researchers. But it does require nurses to have a fundamental understanding of the research process if they are to be able to critically review the evidence available to them. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that research still comprises such a small part of the pre-registration nursing curriculum, and shocking that it is often missing or treated as an inconvenient necessity.