This research evaluated the more commonly used Item Response Theory metric linking procedures along with a new procedure called the Area-Minimization Approach. Specifically, the metric linking procedures examined were: (1) Mean-Mean, (2) Mean-Sigma, (3) Test Characteristic Function (TCF), (4) Item Characteristic Function (ICF), and (5) Area-Minimization Approach. The goal was to determine how the methods compare to one another, if the Area-Minimization method performs better than the traditional methods, and if conducting linking was better than not linking at all. Factors believed to affect the performance of the linking methods were manipulated. They included the sample sizes of the groups, the number of common test items, the degree to which the common items represented the total items, and group ability differences. Across methods, the accuracy of the estimated linking coefficients, the similarity between the linking coefficients, and the accuracy in recovering true item parameters was examined. Results indicated that the overall accuracy and agreement among the TCF, ICF and Mean-Mean methods was very high. The Area-Minimization method performed more similarly to the TCF, ICF and Mean-Mean methods than to the Mean-Sigma method. Overall, the Mean-Sigma method performed poorly and had less agreement with the other methods. Recommendations for IRT practitioners were discussed.