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The existing Nordtest methodology for oil spill Identi®cation has over the past 10 years formed an important``platform'' for solving oil spill identi®cation cases both in the Scandinavian countries as well as other countries in Europe, the USA and Canada.``Revision of the Nordtest Methodology for Oil Spill Identi®cation'' is a cooperative project between the National Oil Spill Identi®cation laboratories in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Battelle Memorial Institute (Duxbury) in the USA. The goals of the project are: (1) to re®ne the existing Nordtest methodology into a technically more robust and defensible oil spill identi®cation methodology with focus on determination of quantitative diagnostic indices (ratios) and (2) to adjust the revised Nordtest methodology into guidelines for the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). This paper presents the recommended methodology for the analytical oil spill identi®cation part. The sampling techniques and handling of oil samples and background (reference) samples prior to their arrival at the environmental forensic laboratory is not covered in this paper. The recommended methodology approach is a result of documented analytical improvements and a more quantitative treatment of analytical data from gas chromatographic-¯ame ionization detector (GC/FID) and gas chromatographic-mass spectrometer methods (GC/MS-SIM) and the operational experiences over past few years among the participating forensic laboratories. The experience and literature in the ®eld of oil exploration and production geochemistry have also played an important role for the recommended methodology. The results from a recent Round Robin test carried out among 12 laboratories using this new methodology are presented in a separate paper in this issue (Faksness et al., 2002d).