A systematic construction is presented of 1/4 BPS operators in N=4 superconformal Yang-Mills theory, using either analytic superspace methods or components. In the construction, the operators of the classical theory annihilated by 4 out of 16 supercharges are arranged into two types. The first type consists of those operators that contain 1/4 BPS operators in the full quantum theory. The second type consists of descendants of operators in long unprotected multiplets which develop anomalous dimensions in the quantum theory. The 1/4 BPS operators of the quantum theory are defined to be orthogonal to all the descendant operators with the same classical quantum numbers. It is shown, to order $g^2$, that these 1/4 BPS operators have protected dimensions.
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