A CORESTA Task Force Review of Smoking Methods was established in December 1989 to review all existing smoking methods and to consider the establishment of a set of CORESTA reference methods which were fully up to date and which could be adopted worldwide, using any of the smoking machines currently in routine use and other equipment.

This report gives the details of the study design, the statistical treatment and the results. The following conclusions can be drawn, but they are discussed more fully in the report.

1. Estimates for repeatability and reproducibility for NFDPM, nicotine and water are available for the first time.
2. An empirical relationship has been derived between repeatability and reproducibility for each of the parameters.
3. For all practical purposes there are no differences between smoking machines.
4. The new methods give data which are comparable with but more consistent than the original methods.

The new methods represent a major advance in tobacco smoke analysis and the information on the methods as well as the collaborative experiment have been made available to the International Standards Organisation.

The report was amended in 2019 to edit a typo in formula A7-8.