Benefiting from improved electrical conductivity, the N-doped MoSe2 nanosheets show substantially enhanced HER activity with a lower onset overpotential of approximately-135 mV and a smaller Tafel slope of 62 mV dec(-1), which exhibiting enhanced catalytic performance compared with that of pure MoSe2. The success of improving the HER performance via the introduction of N dopant offers a new opportunity in the development of high performance MoSe2-based electrocatalyst. (C) 2018 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.