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Smoking cessation treatment is now integrated into many health‐care systems and a major research effort is under way to improve current success rates. Until now results from randomized clinical trials have been reported in many different ways, leading to problems of interpretation. We propose six standard criteria comprising the ‘Russell Standard’ (RS). These criteria are applicable to trials of cessation aids where participants have a defined target quit date and there is face‐to‐face contact with researchers or clinic staff, as follows. (1) Follow‐up for 6 months (RS6) or 12 months (RS12) from the target quit date or the end of a predefined ‘grace period’; (2) self‐report of smoking abstinence over the whole follow‐up period allowing up to five cigarettes in total; (3) biochemical verification of abstinence at least at the 6‐month or 12‐month follow‐up point; (4) use of an ‘intention‐to‐treat’ approach in which data from …