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Does anyone know a way to make endnote citations that use words or sentence fragments from the body of the text, instead of numbers or symbols? (My reason for doing this is so that there is no citation clutter in the body of the text, but that interested readers can look to the back and easily find the reference for a certain fact.) For example, the sentence

He stated that he wished to know the land.

would be cited in the endnotes as

"he wished to know the land." Heisenberg, 1949, p. 32.

I am trying to do this with bibTex. The endnote citations would be followed by the full, bibTexed bibliography. Thanks for any help.

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  • Welcome to TeX.SX! Commented Dec 30, 2014 at 1:26
  • Don't do this. If you really must, at least use footnotes so your readers don't have to search through pages and then try to figure out where in the list of notes, this bit of text is. But it would still be horrible. How will your reader know when you have cited something and when not? Unless you are going to change your text to always make this obvious, you leave your reader to guess when you might have cited a source and when not. Commented Dec 30, 2014 at 2:43
  • I think this is more like indexing Commented Dec 30, 2014 at 6:49
  • @cfr -- this is a fairly common style in many serious nonfiction books, and it isn't really a problem, unless one insists on referring to every note as it occurs. (in the books i've read that use this style, really important "additional" information is usually handled as a traditional, bottom-of-page, footnote. the endnotes are usually citations, "where i got this information", although occasionally there's some additional material, such as from an interview, that is interesting, but not necessary to the main point in the text.) Commented Dec 30, 2014 at 16:35
  • @barbarabeeton I've also seem books done like this. I find them horrible in terms of actually finding information. Even regular endnotes, which are bad enough, are several orders of magnitude better. Commented Dec 30, 2014 at 16:45

1 Answer 1

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Here's a solution to my question. Using the 'endnotes' package, we can define a function

% define a new citation function \newcommand{\mycite}[3][]{\let\theendnote\relax\endnotetext{``#2": \citet[#1]{#3}}} % arguments: 1: page (optional); 2: sentence fragment; 3: citation

Then it can be used as follows within the text:

\mycite[p. 32]{he wished to know the land}{heisenberg1949}

and then the citation will show up in the endnotes, without superscripted numbers, as

"he wished to know the land": Heisenberg (1949, p. 32)

For more complications, such as additional comments in the endnotes or multiple citations, we can define additional functions:

\newcommand{\myciteeg}[3][]{\let\theendnote\relax\endnotetext{``#2": E.g., \citet[#1]{#3}}} % the above, with an 'E.g.' \newcommand{\mycitesee}[3][]{\let\theendnote\relax\endnotetext{``#2": See \citet[#1]{#3}}} % the above, but with a 'See' \newcommand{\myendnote}[1]{\let\theendnote\relax\endnotetext{#1}} % for general endnotes \newcommand{\myciteinside}[3][]{{``#2": \citet[#1]{#3}}} % for multiple citations at one go; must use this as the first citation inside \myendnote \newcommand{\myciteinsideeg}[3][]{{``#2": E.g., \citet[#1]{#3}}} % the above, with an 'E.g.' \newcommand{\myciteinsidesee}[3][]{{``#2": See \citet[#1]{#3}}} % the above, but with a 'See'

and make citations like the following:

\myendnote{\myciteinside[pp. 258-259]{Darwin generally...goal}{gould2000}; see also \citet[pp. 242-243]{gould2003}}

which yields

"Darwin generally...goal": Gould (2000, pp. 258-259); see also Gould (2003, pp. 242-243)

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  • Instead of using " (double-quote mark) in the instances of ``#2", consider using '' (consecutive single-quote marks). Or, load the csquotes package and write \enquote{#2}. Separately, do use -- rather than just - to denote ranges of numbers, and use \ldots instead of typing .... Commented Jan 13, 2015 at 8:55

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