Book excerpt: Over the past 40 years, RIS models for hundreds of polymer structures have been developed, and now the RIS approach is available in several software packages. However, users are often faced with the time-consuming task of finding the appropriate RIS parameters among the literature. This book facilitates this task by providing a comprehensive overview of the models available. It reviews the literature from the very first applications to the end of 1994, comprises synthetic as well as naturally occuring macromolecules, and tabulates all the pertinent features of published models. It will thus help readers, even those new to this method, to take advantage of this computationally efficient way of assessing the conformational properties of macromolecular systems.