To resolve the problem of UV spectra overlap, an artificial neural network (ANN) with error back propagation (BP) technique was used to determine the contents of benzoic acid and salicylic acid in compound benzoic acid liniment without any separationWhen the network developed in this study consisted of 5 hidden layer nodes and 9 input nodes, the mean recoveries of benzoic acid and salicylic acid were 105.0% (RSD = 1.5%) and 102.0% (RSD = 2.0%), resp.The method is simple, rapid and accurate.