diff --git a/docs/conf.py b/docs/conf.py
index f49f79cd5..eba416cd6 100644
--- a/docs/conf.py
+++ b/docs/conf.py
@@ -252,6 +252,10 @@ coverage_ignore_pyobjects = [
 
     # Private exception used by the command-line interface implementation.
     r'^scrapy\.exceptions\.UsageError',
+
+    # Methods of BaseItemExporter subclasses are only documented in
+    # BaseItemExporter.
+    r'^scrapy\.exporters\.(?!BaseItemExporter\b)\w*?\.',
 ]
 
 
diff --git a/docs/news.rst b/docs/news.rst
index ce5b8b406..5915ba742 100644
--- a/docs/news.rst
+++ b/docs/news.rst
@@ -1269,8 +1269,8 @@ This 1.1 release brings a lot of interesting features and bug fixes:
     this behavior, update :setting:`ROBOTSTXT_OBEY` in ``settings.py`` file
     after creating a new project.
   - Exporters now work on unicode, instead of bytes by default (:issue:`1080`).
-    If you use ``PythonItemExporter``, you may want to update your code to
-    disable binary mode which is now deprecated.
+    If you use :class:`~scrapy.exporters.PythonItemExporter`, you may want to
+    update your code to disable binary mode which is now deprecated.
   - Accept XML node names containing dots as valid (:issue:`1533`).
   - When uploading files or images to S3 (with ``FilesPipeline`` or
     ``ImagesPipeline``), the default ACL policy is now "private" instead
@@ -1408,8 +1408,8 @@ Bugfixes
 - Fixed bug on ``XMLItemExporter`` with non-string fields in
   items (:issue:`1738`).
 - Fixed startproject command in OS X (:issue:`1635`).
-- Fixed PythonItemExporter and CSVExporter for non-string item
-  types (:issue:`1737`).
+- Fixed :class:`~scrapy.exporters.PythonItemExporter` and CSVExporter for
+  non-string item types (:issue:`1737`).
 - Various logging related fixes (:issue:`1294`, :issue:`1419`, :issue:`1263`,
   :issue:`1624`, :issue:`1654`, :issue:`1722`, :issue:`1726` and :issue:`1303`).
 - Fixed bug in ``utils.template.render_templatefile()`` (:issue:`1212`).
diff --git a/docs/topics/exporters.rst b/docs/topics/exporters.rst
index f5048d2da..11b3045ec 100644
--- a/docs/topics/exporters.rst
+++ b/docs/topics/exporters.rst
@@ -165,9 +165,9 @@ BaseItemExporter
       value unchanged except for ``unicode`` values which are encoded to
       ``str`` using the encoding declared in the :attr:`encoding` attribute.
 
-      :param field: the field being serialized. If a raw dict is being 
+      :param field: the field being serialized. If a raw dict is being
           exported (not :class:`~.Item`) *field* value is an empty dict.
-      :type field: :class:`~scrapy.item.Field` object or an empty dict 
+      :type field: :class:`~scrapy.item.Field` object or an empty dict
 
       :param name: the name of the field being serialized
       :type name: str
@@ -223,6 +223,12 @@ BaseItemExporter
       * ``indent<=0`` each item on its own line, no indentation
       * ``indent>0`` each item on its own line, indented with the provided numeric value
 
+PythonItemExporter
+------------------
+
+.. autoclass:: PythonItemExporter
+
+
 .. highlight:: none
 
 XmlItemExporter
@@ -410,3 +416,8 @@ JsonLinesItemExporter
    this exporter is well suited for serializing large amounts of data.
 
 .. _JSONEncoder: https://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html#json.JSONEncoder
+
+MarshalItemExporter
+-------------------
+
+.. autoclass:: MarshalItemExporter
diff --git a/scrapy/exporters.py b/scrapy/exporters.py
index 695c74fec..6fc87ed18 100644
--- a/scrapy/exporters.py
+++ b/scrapy/exporters.py
@@ -276,6 +276,13 @@ class PickleItemExporter(BaseItemExporter):
 
 
 class MarshalItemExporter(BaseItemExporter):
+    """Exports items in a Python-specific binary format (see
+    :mod:`marshal`).
+
+    :param file: The file-like object to use for exporting the data. Its
+                 ``write`` method should accept :class:`bytes` (a disk file
+                 opened in binary mode, a :class:`~io.BytesIO` object, etc)
+    """
 
     def __init__(self, file, **kwargs):
         self._configure(kwargs)
@@ -297,10 +304,13 @@ class PprintItemExporter(BaseItemExporter):
 
 
 class PythonItemExporter(BaseItemExporter):
-    """The idea behind this exporter is to have a mechanism to serialize items
-    to built-in python types so any serialization library (like
-    json, msgpack, binc, etc) can be used on top of it. Its main goal is to
-    seamless support what BaseItemExporter does plus nested items.
+    """This is a base class for item exporters that extends
+    :class:`BaseItemExporter` with support for nested items.
+
+    It serializes items to built-in Python types, so that any serialization
+    library (e.g. :mod:`json` or msgpack_) can be used on top of it.
+
+    .. _msgpack: https://pypi.org/project/msgpack/
     """
     def _configure(self, options, dont_fail=False):
         self.binary = options.pop('binary', True)