This guide discusses the suitability of biomarkers of exposure (BoE) for measuring product compliance based on their abundance, specificity and half-life and suggests single BoE and BoE patterns to verify product use status for the most popular product categories (EC, HTP, NP) as well as combustible cigarettes (CC) and traditional, smokeless tobacco (SLT) like moist snuff based on the current scientific literature.

The guide may help researchers in the field in the design of new studies with a robust assessment of subjects’ compliance in long-term, epidemiological and/or cross-sectional studies where the use behaviour of the subjects is not under rigorous control but mainly assessed by self-report.