AbstractIn the series of analytical techniques for identification of chemical substances, infrared spectrometry presents by far the highest information content. However, the information is most complicated too. It concerns a multitude of band positions, band intensities and band shapes, which, moreover, can be disturbed by matrix and other effects. The high redundancy, however, allows conclusions to be made by a qualitative, subjective procedure.IR is often used to prove the equality between a sample and a reference material, e.g. in quality control of a production process. In forensic control, the question to be answered is mostly not to prove equality, but whether or not the presence of a compound in a sample, e.g. a drug, can be proved. Moreover, testing has to be performed according to objective rules.To fulfil these requirements, a new retrieval algorithm, the ‘Adequate Peaks Search’, is presented. It concerns representing the reference spectra by sets of adequate peak positions and the sample spectrum by a set of all peak positions, whereafter the cross‐sections of the sample set and the reference sets are determined. The concept ‘adequate peak’ is defined and criteria have been formulated to evaluate the results into a positive (presence of the analyte is proved) or negative (presence is not proved) conclusion.The detection limit when the Adequate Peaks Search (APS) method was applied was four to seven times lower than that attained by a number o