Zusammenfassung: Length-based population analyses have had a fairly long but not too successful history. These methods are required over a range of situations from when aging is impossible to when it is difficult or prohibitively expensive. There have been 3 sorts of approaches: 1) modal analysis to convert length frequencies to ages 2) age-length key enhancement and 3) imbedded growth models. The last group is what is generally known as length-based methods and the focus of this review. At the 1991 ICES Methods Working Group, 5 techniques were compared and these results are summarized. Two of these techniques, cohort slicing and length-based ADAPT, are applied to swordfish (Xiphias gladius ) data. The imbedded growth model for the former technique is the mean size at age while the latter uses the distribution of size at age. A new method is also presented which begins with cohort slicing then estimates numbers at age and enhances an inferred age-length key at each step of an iterative process.