This paper presents a method for identifying the general-order poles of a meromorphic function algebraically from its values on the unit circle, which has various applications in inverse source problems in potential analysis. First, we derive a system of Dth-degree equations for N distinct poles zn of order Dn, where n = 1, 2, . . . ,N and D = max1≤n≤N{Dn}. Then, we transform these equations into linear equations for the coefficients of the Nth-degree equation whose roots are zn so that the poles are obtained algebraically from data. The obtained poles can be used as an initial solution for iterative algorithms. A method for estimating the order Dn of each pole is also proposed and is numerically verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]