Around 2.7 billion people rely on biomass fuelled inefficient devices hit' cooking and heating. Improved Cooking Stoves are promoted as a means to mitigate the economic, elivironmental and social implications of this practice. However, their diffusion is hindered by a number of factors, including in particular the lack of agreement on performance evaluation methodologies. Laboratory protocols are designed to give useful indications to cookstoves developers, in order to improve their performance under controlled conditions, while field protocols provide the assessment of real perforinance of a cookstoire in a given context. However, due to high time and finance requirements of the latter, lab results are often used also for stoves selection, also because of a general misunderstanding regardihg their correct utilisation. In this work, we provide a review of all lab protocols officially published to date, comparing conteptual and technical aspects. We find that no protocol takes into account all the relevant factors at once. As a result, lab tests carry little information about real field performance, and can be misleading regarding stoves optimisation. Therefore, the analysis reveals the need to define better standards, regarding: (i) repeatability, metrics and statistical analysis of results; (ii) burn sequences calibrated from time to time according to the specific user. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.