As a healthcare profession nursing has a duty to develop practices that contribute to the health and well being of patients. The aim of this paper is to discuss current issues in clinical research within nursing. The paper defines clinical interventions research as a theoretically based, integrated and sequential approach to clinical knowledge generation. The paper provides specific criteria for defining a clinical intervention together with an overview of the stages involved in clinical research from problem identification to implementing knowledge in practice. The paper also explored the extent to which nursing research was focussed on clinical issues, through a snapshot review of all the original research papers in Europe's three leading nursing research journals. In total of 517 different papers were included and classified in the review. Of these 88% (n=455) were classified as non-clinical intervention and 12% (n=62) as clinical intervention studies. The paper examined the intervention studies in detail examining: the underpinning theory; linkage to previous (pre-clinical) work; evidence of granularity; protocol clarity (generalisable and parsimonious); the phase of knowledge development; and evidence of safety (adverse event reporting). The paper discusses some of the shortcomings of interventions research in nursing and suggests a number of ideas to help address these problems, including: a consensus statement on interventions research in nursing; a register of nursing intervention studies; the need for nursing to develop clinical research areas in which to develop potential interventions (nursing laboratories); and a call for nursing researchers to publish more research in nursing specific journals.