Guides are documents that provide advice

• to standards writers on how to deal with specific issues when drafting standards; OR
• to national standards bodies on how to deal with issues specific to standardization principles.

A number of Guides are jointly developed between ISO and IEC and then published as ISO/IEC Guides.

Many of these issues are broad and therefore of interest to a wide range of ISO committees – for example, guidance on how to take account of sustainability in the drafting of standards (ISO Guide 82), or methods of regional or national adoption of standards (ISO/IEC Guide 21).

There are also a number of Guides on more specialized topics that are designed for use by committees working in particular sectors – for example, rules for drafting and presentation of safety standards for machinery (ISO Guide 78) or guidance on the inclusion of safety aspects in standards for medical devices (ISO/IEC Guide 63).