A method for monitoring a manufacture of wood-based products includes at least one pressing process with regard to the emission of volatile organic compounds from the wood-based products, in which the concentration of the volatile organic compounds is detected during the manufacture. The concentration of the volatile organic compounds is detected during an extraction of product parts or of a product surface using a measurement method from the field of TDLS (Tunable Diode Laser Spectroscopy), FTIR, NIR, IMS or photoacoustics, that the detected concentration of the volatile organic compounds is fed to a mathematical model, and that parameters such as product thickness, areal density, production feed rate, flow rate in an extraction of product parts or of the product surface and the moisture content of the raw materials for the wood-based products are determined before the pressing process and are also fed to the mathematical model.