His first publication, in which he was assisted by Jacques Loppin and Antoine Pouget, was the first volume of a nevercompleted series of previously unpublished Analecta graeca (1688).
The first work which he edited was the Anthologia Graeca or Analecta veterum Poetarum Graecorum (1772-1776), in which his innovations on the established mode of criticism startled European scholars; for wherever it seemed to him that an obscure or difficult passage might be made intelligible and easy by a change of text, he did not scruple to make the necessary alterations, whether the new reading were supported by manuscript authority or not.
To realize the present state of hagiology, the Bibliotheca hagiographica, both Latin and Greek, published by the Bollandists, and the Bulletin hagiographique, which appears in each number of the Analecta Bollandiana (see Bollandists), must be consulted.