In February 2005, the major contributors to quitline development and research met in Washington, DC, at a conference: “Developing a Research Agenda to Improve the Impact of Tobacco Use Quitlines.” The five sponsors of the conference—the National Institute on Drug Abuse; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; National Cancer Institute; the Canadian Tobacco Control Research Institute; and Health Canada—subsequently agreed to support a special issue of Tobacco Control on quitlines. We are grateful to these sponsors and to the editorial staff of Tobacco Control for making this issue possible. Both the 2005 conference and the special issue testify to the emergence of quitlines as a widely available, evidence based resource for smokers seeking cessation assistance. Anderson and Zhu1 in the concluding paper of this issue, document the rapid growth and availability of quitline assistance throughout the world.

Our goal was to publish papers that would have value both to the research community and to those making decisions about quitline implementation and funding. The 16 diverse papers in this issue meet this goal. The first paper by Stead et al2 summarises the latest Cochrane Library evaluation of the effectiveness of quitline counselling. Their key meta-analysis is …