Despite Jacob Leisler's historic importance, he has been generally neglected by twentieth-century American scholars. That Leisler's correspondence is in Dutch, French, and German, as well as in English, is a primary reason for this neglect. Another reason is that serious scholarship into the German-born Leisler, as well as into the largely non-English population of the middle colonies in general, fell victim to the anti-German hysteria of World War I. Leisler's papers are widely scattered. In New York they are found throughout the state from such local town archives as that of East Hampton to the State Archives in Albany. Often these papers are found rotting in forgotten boxes in municipal basements. Outside New York, Leisler's letters exist in widely diverse archives in Germany, Holland, France, England, the West Indies, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia. The Notarial Records of the Amsterdam Gemeentearchief, for example, contain a large selection of Leisler's business correspondence.

The modern neglect of Leisler can also partially be attributed to the political designs and struggles of eighteenth-century New Yorkers. For decades following his execution in 1691, Leisler's government and reforms remained a major source of factionalism within New York politics. Leislerians struggled to preserve Leisler's legacy while anti-Leislerians attempted to eradicate his memory and strike his name from the public record. In addition, the broad notoriety Leisler enjoyed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in a strong collector's market that further scattered his manuscripts. For each of these reasons the Jacob Leisler Papers project is required to search well beyond the government offices and local archives that would logically hold the papers of an important New York figure.

The only major published collection of Leisler's papers appeared in 1849, when approximately 400 Leisler documents for the years 1689-1691 were printed in volume II of the Documentary History of New York. Compiled prior to the imposition of scholarly standards, the Documentary History of New York collection lacking annotation, chronologically out of order, and poorly transcribed, has nonetheless served as the basis for all subsequent studies of both Jacob Leisler and late seventeenth-century New York. A subsequent collection of Leisler material, consisting largely of documents for the months February-March 1691, was published as volume I of the New-York Historical Society Collections in 1868.

Other than the Documentary History of New York and New-York Historical Society Collections, English-speaking students of late seventeenth-century Dutch-speaking America have previously had available only the published papers of such English imperial officials as William Blathwayt, Edward Randolph, and Sir Edmund Andros, and the letters of such New Englanders as Samuel Sewall, and Increase and Cotton Mather collections which make only passing reference to events in the former Dutch colony of New Netherland. As a result, there is a large gap in the knowledge of events in New York between the 1664 conquest of New Netherland by the English and the early eighteenth century.