ABSTRACT Book editors in the social sciences and humanities play an important role in their fields but little is known about their typical publication and collaboration patterns. To partially fill this gap, we compare Flemish editors and other researchers, in terms of career stage, productivity, publication types, publications with domestic and international collaboration as well as the number of (international or all) unique co‐authors, co‐editors and associated book chapter authors. The results show that editors are mostly established researchers, especially in the social sciences, produce more book chapters and monographs than do other researchers, and are more productive. Nevertheless, editors collaborate less than do other researchers, both in terms of publications and in number of co‐authors. Including book chapter authors in the editors' collaboration networks makes those networks substantially larger, demonstrating that editors do not mainly call upon authors from their existing collaboration network when choosing book chapter authors in the edited books. Finally, editors seem to co‐author with their book chapter authors slightly more often after the publication of the edited book than before.