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Generally accepted quality criteria for the comparison of immunoassays are still missing and assay conditions vary greatly between different laboratories. To address this problem, the influence of different parameters on the overall assay performance was assessed, specifically for different enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) for the anthropogenic markers caffeine (CAF) and carbamazepine (CBZ). Special emphasis was dedicated to the parameters temperature, assay format and enzyme-substrate combination. The temperature parameter was systematically studied for all incubation steps of the direct EIA formats employing the photometric horseradish peroxidase (HRP) substrate 3,3’,5,5’- tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) and the fluorometric HRP substrate 3-(4-hydroxyphenyl)propionic acid for both analytes. A temperature decrease only during the competition step led to an increase in assay sensitivity by a factor of 10 to 15 for CBZ and CAF, respectively, independent of the enzyme substrate used. Room temperature experiments yielded the smallest coefficients of variations, minimizing the edge effect. The influence of the assay format on different performance parameters was studied with the determination of CAF in consumer products. In addition to the HRP substrates, the enzyme alkaline phosphate (AP) and its chromogenic substrate para-nitrophenyl phosphate and a fluorescent substrate, 4-methylumbelliferyl phosphate, were employed. Seven quality criteria were defined and validated to compare these immunoassays. The evaluation of the four criteria (sensitivity, measurement range, relative dynamic range and goodness of fit) for the standard curves revealed that the direct format is superior to the indirect format, with the HRP TMB format showing the best performance. Three additional criteria for an applicationdriven analysis of real samples, in this case CAF-containing beverages and cosmetics, confirmed this result in terms of accuracy as well as intra- and inter-plate precision. The enzyme-substrate combination was investigated when several direct CBZ assays were applied to the analysis of water samples; here, three HRP assays and four AP assays were studied, along with luminescence detection. The HRP assays reached better sensitivities and lower quantifiable concentrations compared to the AP assays. Only the HRP assays and the chemiluminescent AP juice assay fulfilled the requirements for the four criteria applied to standard curves; all other AP assays were not considered for application to real samples based on these criteria. The AP juice assay can only be employed for influent samples whereas all HRP assays are applicable to influent and effluent wastewater samples according to intra- and inter-plate precision. Furthermore, the HRP assays alone are suitable for surface water analysis; here, the chromogenic HRP TMB assay yielded the best results, as any type of water sample can be quantified with high precision. Whether these quality criteria, derived here for standard curves as well as their application to real samples, can be transferred to other immunoassay formats for quality assurance remains to be shown.