The linkage of aromatic ring structures in vacuum residues was important for the reifning process. The Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) combined with collision-induced dissociation (CID) is a powerful method to characterize the molecular structure of petroleum fractions. In this work, model compounds with differ-ent aromatic ring structures were measured by CID FT-ICR MS. The cracking of the parent ions and the generated fragment ions were able to distinguish different linkage of the model compounds. Then, vacuum residues were separated into saturates, aromat-ics, resins and asphaltenes fractions (SARA), and each fraction was characterized by CID technology. According to the experi-mental results, the aromatic rings in saturates and aromatics fractions were mainly of the island-type structures, while the aromatic rings in resins and asphaltenes fractions had a signiifcant amount of archipelago-type structures.