Abstract A general procedure for reducing the bias of point estimators is introduced. The technique includes the “jackknife” as a special case. The existing notion of reapplication is shown to lack a desirable bias removal property for which it was originally designed. Proper reapplication is proposed to conform to the general notion of higher order bias elimination and an interesting algorithm for the correct method is defined. Illustrative examples are drawn from ratio estimation, reliability and truncated distributions. The reduced mean square error which attracted some attention to the jackknife is present in the generalization for some applications.