Non-distracting citation style with no endnotes in the text

JDRaskin

I am working on a biography and don’t want citation numbers in the text distracting readers. I’ve noticed that some biographies, especially when marketed to non-academics, use the non-distracting citation style described here: https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/16551/least-distracting-method-of-citing-in-a-book.

Can Zotero be used to format a document in this style or something similar? If so, how? What would such a style be called, and does Zotero have it?

Btw, here is how the style is described if you follow the aforementioned link:

“…a common way to reduce distraction in popular non-fiction is to have no in-text references at all and append endnotes to the end of the text that are ordered "chronologically" and give page numbers and text snippets to identify what they relate to.

E.g. this text on page 216:

It has been shown that women are smart. So we must allow them to go to university.
can have an endnote something like this:

216 women are smart Clever, W. (1753). Experiments on the Cleverness of Women. Birmingham: Clever Woman Press.”

Any help appreciated. Thanks.

adamsmith

Short answer is no, Zotero can't do this -- among other issues, its citations simply don't 'know' on which page they are, and, of course, unless you're self-publishing and doing all typesetting yourself, the actual page numbers in a published book are again quite different from what's in your document.

I would do something like using an endnote style like Chicago Manual and then when you're done, copy the text of the entire endnote section and turn it into regular text, add the page numbers based on the endnote anchors in the text, and then delete all endnotes as described e.g. here.