Few changes of substance are contained in the eighteenth edition. The format has been revised; numerous rules have been clarified; the treatment of foreign and international materials, expanded; and the tables, both added to and extended. The Bluebook continues to deal predominantly with the citation needs and norms of law journal writing. However, the material previously relegated to nineteen pages of "practitioner notes" has been slightly expanded into a first section entitled "An Introduction to Basic Legal Citation" (this work's title since its release in 1993). That section is accompanied by a new set of tables furnishing references to local (jurisdiction-specific) citation rules and style guides, information that has been included in the ALWD Citation Manual from the start.
The Bluebook's coverage of Internet-based material is significantly expanded and rationalized. While the seventeenth edition divided Internet citations into three categories, the eighteenth reduces the number to two – direct citations of material accessible only online and parallel citations furnished to facillitate access to material distributed in print, but not widely available in that form.
The introductory signal rule changes made by the sixteenth edition were reversed in the seventeenth. Rule 1.2 now provides as it did prior to 1996. "E.g." is back as a separate signal and "contra" is restored.
Rule 10.2.2 no longer spares the first or only word of a party name from abbreviation if it is in the table of abbreviated words (T.6). In addition, that table has been expanded.
Rule 10.3.3 acknowledges the spreading phenomenon of court adopted vendor- and medium-neutral citation systems, requires the use of such a system where the jurisdiction has adopted one. 10.3.1(b) requires the addition of a parallel citation to a regional reporter even though the rule establishing a vendor, medium-neutral citation system may not.
Previously the Bluebook insisted on use of "et al." rather than a full listing of author names when a book had more than two authors. The revised Rule 15.1.1 loosens up to permit a full list when "the names of the authors are relevant."
Electronic and other nonprint resources (commercial online systems, public and commercial internet sites, CD-ROM, Microform and more) have been broken out of Rule 17 (which now deals only with unpublished and forthcoming sources) and placed in a new Rule 18. (The former Rules 18, 19, and 20 have been renumbered accordingly.)