Background correction has been shown to be an effective and indispensable modification in the spectrophotometric determination of ascorbic acid. The decomposition of ascorbic acid in pharmaceutical samples was carried out by incubation with sodium hydroxide to give products that were insensitive to ultraviolet light. The rapid oxidation in air of ascorbic acid, especially in dilute solutions, was avoided by the use of the flow injection principle for spectrophotometric determination and by employing a carrier stream of an anti-oxidizing nature consisting of 6 µg ml–1 of 2-mercaptoethanol in 0.25% sulphuric acid. The optimized method with a single channel manifold made use of a carrier stream flow rate of 1.1 ml min–1, an injection volume of 50 µl, a delay coil of 50 cm (0.5 mm i.d.) and detection at 245 nm. The throughput was at least 180 injections h–1. The proposed flow injection method yielded results for the analysis of 0–20 µg ml–1 of ascorbic acid that were 99–102%(relative standard deviation 0.6% or better) in agreement with those produced by comparable methods involving titration with iodine, chloranil or 2,6-dichlorophenolindophenol [4-(2,6-dichloro-4-hydroxyphenylimino)cyclohexa-2,5-dienone], and high-performance liquid chromatography. When the agreement was not good (as low as 14% with respect to the method being compared), this was traced to the presence of substances which are known to interfere in one or other of the methods of comparison.