This paper investigates flow and heat transfer of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) pseudo-plastic nanofluid in a finite film over unsteady stretching surface with internal heating effects. Four different types of nanoparticles, Cu, Al2O3, CuO and TiO2 are considered with pseudo-plastic carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC)water used as base fluids. The effects of power law viscosity on temperature fields are taken into account by assuming temperature field is similar to the velocity ones with modified Fourier's law of heat conduction for power-law fluids. Governing PDEs are reduced into coupled non-linear ODEs and solved numerically by shooting technique coupled with Runge Kutta scheme and Newton's method. The effects of Hartmann number, power law index, unsteadiness parameter, thickness parameter and generalized Prandt-1 number on the velocity and temperature fields are presented graphically and analyzed in detail. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.