Abstract
Traditionally, studies on expertise have used social criteria to identify highly respected and experienced individuals and examined how these experts differ from less-experienced individuals. Our article reviews research on nursing expertise during the last decades from the perspective of the expert-performance approach, which focuses on reproducibly superior performance in everyday life. Our review proposes explanations for repeated failures to find reliably superior performance for nurses with longer professional experience. The article concludes with an outline of how the expert-performance approach can be applied to the study of nursing expertise where the focus is on measurement and analysis of superior nursing performance.