The carbonate content is one of the most frequently used climatic or environmental proxies in lake sediments. There are several conventional ways for determining the carbonate content of lacustrine sediments, but the carbonate content determined by different methods have not been compared, especially for the same samples of a sedimentary sequence. Here we present a comparison of the carbonate content determined by three methods (loss on ignition, acid-base titration and gasometric method) applied to a short core taken from Lake Dalongchi (DLC12, 110 cm, at 1 cm resolution) in Xinjiang, NW China. Our results show that there is generally no significant difference in the down-core variation trend of the carbonate content among the three methods. The carbonate content determined by loss on ignition (LOI) is cal 5% higher than that measured by acid-base titration (AT) and cal 3% higher than that by gasometric method (GM). The GM and AT methods produce similar results and their difference is less than 2% in average. Therefore, the LOI method may have over-estimated the carbonate content due to the decomposition of minerals other than carbonates in the samples. Further comparison of the carbonate content by the three methods with that by X-ray diffraction (XRD) suggest the carbonate content by GM has the highest correlation with that by XRD. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of each method, GM is suggested for conventional carbonate content analysis in lake sediments in terms of accuracy, expense, analytical skills required and time consumed for analysis.