Recently, shale gas entered our exploration area as an unconventional energy source.Geological study has shown that the shale in southern China has good qualities for exploration.Because of the unique storage conditions and continuous complicated accumulation patterns of shale gas, it is difficult to use conventional geophysical methods to predict sweet spots.According to geological deposition theory, the total organic carbon(TOC) is the basic element that controls the formation of pyrite in marine sediment under a deep water deposition environment.There is a close relationship between the TOC and pyrite in such deep water deposition environments.In this paper we have found that pyrite plays an important role in the prediction of TOC.Through laboratory measurement analysis and joint inversion of the complex resistivity and phase, the marine organic-rich shale samples showed low resistivity and high polarizability.We think that the induced polarization(IP) electromagnetic exploration method can evaluate shale gas formation effectively, and application has shown that IP results are in good agreement with the seismic prediction for sweet spots.With the growth in global demand for oil and gas resources, conventional oil and gas exploration and development potential is very narrow, but unconventional reservoirs are open.Recently, shale gas has become the new target of global oil and gas exploration and development.Exploitation of shale gas and tight oil has brought a major change to the world which is gradually affecting the pattern of world energy supply and demand.It is estimated that there are rich marine shale gas resources in the south of China.Geologically, there are six sets of marine shale formations in Proterozoic-Paleozoic strata in southern China.Specifically, in the Silurian Longmaxi group(S1l) and the Cambrian Qiongzhusi group(∈ln), the shale has a good quality of TOC and thickness, which indicate the huge potential reserves of unconventional gas.The seismic method is certainly the first choice to predict sweet spots, but unfortunately, it has run into difficulties in southern China because of rugged tomography and complicated geology.Because of the low resistivity and strong polarization of marine organic-rich shale compared with the surrounding rock, the IP electromagnetic exploration method, which has been considered as an effective supplementary method, can be used to do that. At room temperature and atmospheric pressure, the complex resistivity sweep measurement is obtained for a saturated shale core by the SI1260 impedance analyzer.Finally, the joint inversion of complex resistivity amplitude and phase is conducted using single Cole-Cole, double Cole-Cole, Cole-Cole multiply Brown, and Dias models.Inversion results indicate that the double Cole-Cole and Cole-Cole multiply Brown models can describe shale cores' complex resistivity and phase curves with smaller fitting errors than the other models. We can get accurate spectral parameters from each inversion.It is useful to find shale reserves by the IP method and to realize shale gas complex resistivity logging.