The problem of converting the experimental data generated by a capillary viscometer into a viscosity versus shear rate plot is formulated as a linear Volterra integral equation of the first kind. A method based on Tikhonov regularisation is applied to solve this ill-posed inverse problem. The performance of the method was assessed by applying it to a set of synthetic data where the noise level can be artificially varied. It has also been tested on a set of real data for a commercial HDPE. In all the cases investigated Tikhonov regularisation proved to be a simple and yet reliable way for dealing with the inverse problem of capillary viscometry. (C)1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.