There are two ways to accomplish this:
1) If you don’t use footnotes in your document, then insert all the citations as footnotes. Then use Peter Kahrel’s free Sidenotes script (https://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/sidenotes.html) to convert all footnotes to sidenotes. You can play around with the settings so that each footnote should accompany its parent paragraph in the side of the margin.
If you do use footnotes in your document and this is not an option, then try the following method:
2)
- Create a small text box the size of an average citation
- Give it an object style
- In the object style settings define the Anchored Object Settings so that it is always in the correct position on the outer margins of the page (make sure to turn on “Relative to Spine” if you have a facing pages document)
- Copy the text box to the clipboard
- Now whenever you want to add a citation just hit Ctrl-V in the text and the citation text box will automatically pop up on the outer margin ready to be filled up with text. And as the text reflows, so does the citation. If set up properly it will even jump to the left margin on a left-facing page.
If your document is very predictable, then you can initiate a Find/Change to place the text boxes in one fell swoop!
Hope this helps.
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