We investigate the convective heat and mass transfer in nanofluid flow over a stretching sheet subject to hydromagnetic, viscous dissipation, chemical reaction and Soret effects. Two types of nanofluids, namely Cu-water and Ag-water were studied. A similarity transformation was used to obtain a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations, which was then solved numerically using the Matlab "bvp4c" function. Numerical results were obtained for the skin friction coefficient. Nusselt number, Sherwood number as well as for the velocity, temperature and concentration profiles for selected values of the governing parameters, such as the nanoparticle volume fraction phi, the magnetic parameter M. For a fixed Prandtl number Pr = 6.2 (corresponding to water) and different values of the magnetic field parameter and the nanoparticle volume fraction, we have shown that a good agreement exists between the present results and those in the literature. It was shown that the Cu-water nanofluid exhibits higher wall heat and mass transfer rates as compared to a Ag-water nanofluid. The influence of a magnetic field is to reduce both wall heat and mass transfer rates. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.