Abstract
The efficiencies of herbal medicines depend on the amount of active components in them, which could vary significantly in contents. Therefore, the quality control of herbal medicines is a very important issue. This review summarizes the true and false, producing region identification and quality evaluation of herbal medicines by means of their component overlapping infrared spectra (defined as infrared fingerprint spectra or IR FPS). The true and false identification could be performed with specific peaks and their absorption ratios. The producing region and quality of herbal medicines could be determined by analyzing the IR FPS with mathematical classification methods, such as potential component analysis, cluster analysis, and correlation coefficient analysis.