Scientific sources: footnote plus endnote with hyperlinks?

English
#1

I am writing on a scientific paper.

Here I need to have dynamic ¹ ³ numbers, a footnote and an endnote

Issues here are:

  • I dont want to do it manually
  • seems I can either make a footnote or an endnote
  • I want to have hyperlinks in text that point to the endnote
  • I have a custom heading before the endnote, and the endnote is not on the very last page

Like this:

A duck walked across a road, according to a passenger¹, that …

1: Immanuel Kant (2025)

(last page)

Image sources:

  1. something
  2. something

Literature:

  1. Immanuel Kant (12.01.2025), “something with ducks”, https://example.org
  2. bla

how can I add an endnote with such a header, AND a footnote?

here is the document if you like

document.odt (415.4 KB)

#2

Your “Literature” part looks like a bibliography. There is a rudimentary bibliography in Writer. If your need is not too sophisticated, it could do the trick.

You create first your list of “sources” in the built-in bibliography database and give each entry an “id” like KANT2025. You can insert in your text references like [KANT2025] with Insert>Bibliography Entry. You select one of the entries and the id surrounded by brackets in put into your text.

At the end of the document, the complete list of used entries is inserted with Insert>TOC & Index>TOC, Index or Bibliography.


I don’t understand how detailed your footnotes are. They look as if they duplicate bibliography. They are useful when they are more precise about the citation, e.g. you can have
“1 [KANT2025] page 45 line 10”
In this example I insert the (“global”) bibliography reference in the footnote and add more information to locate the citation.

In Writer, note anchor (in text) is always a hyperlink to the note. Reciprocally, the note number (in the note) is a hyperlink to the anchor in text.

Writer offers both footnotes and endnotes. As the name implies, footnotes are laid out at the bottom of the page wjhere the anchor occurs. Endnotes are collected at the very end of the document. Setting the endnotes in another location is not easy. You must jail a part of the text in a section (beware, what Writer calls a section a special feature designating some range within the document) and request notes to be collected at end of it. This is not user-friendly.

In addition, you can’t insert non-note text in the middle of the endnotes.Consequently adding headings must be done with a fake endnote (you replace its callout by a space character) you attach at an adequate location in your text (near the beginning for a global title). To make it look like a heading, you apply some paragraph style to the note. Take special attention to possible interaction with TOC.

For more detailed and targetd instruction, improve your “specification”. And don’t forget to mention OS name, LO version (because of subtle differences between platforms and releases) and save format (most recipes are only valid for .odt document).

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#3

Hi, thanks for the details!

This looks extremely complex.

I can’t imagine why endnotes would be so messed up, who uses such a system?? I may just do a numbered list at the end, use normal footnotes, and have automatic numbering with manual bibliography at the end.

Or is there a way to create a bibliography at the end, from the numbered footnotes, like a list of contents?

OS: Fedora Linux 41
Version: Latest Flatpak from Flathub
Format: odt of course

#4

Simply because you didn’t abstract enough what you want to do. Try to define as lean a structure as you can. Be as clear as possible in your mind. If you don’t see accurately your goal, you won’t be able to translate it into your paper. Don’t think in terms of features and how to force them into your mould. Think first about the significance of your sentences and how you prove your statements (citations, sources).

Usually a scientific paper meets external constraints like a formal outline or skeleton. Following these rules already achieves half the job.

Endnotes are as simple as footnotes when you accept them as the very last “block” in your document without intermediate text like (chapter) headings or sub-titles. Unfortunately there is a kind of shortcoming about what authors really need endnotes-wise.

Why not? But you sure want to reference your sources from the text. To make sure you capture the correct reference number and this number is updated when you edit your list, you must use cross-references. Do you know how to insert them?

The list can be automatically numbered. I suggest to create a dedicated list style so that there is no spurious interference with other unrelated lists.

I don’t see why this list would be footnotes. There, you’d create a real mess. Your bibliography is simply the “special” numbered list. However by encoding it as a list, yiu lose the automatic alphabetical ordering of the bibliography feature. This order must be manually maintained and you’ll bump into difficulty if you don’t master numbered lists.

No. Footnotes are not intended to be collected in any form of table/list. Bibliography and footnotes are semantically independent.

Why don’t you install directly from Fedora repository? This would be fully automatic without any risk. Presently, version is 24.8.4.2.

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#5

Hi there, looks like I should use cross references then.

If the endnote would allow inserting a Header “Sources” above, that would already solve it…

I have found that I will just reference with ¹

and a list at the end, not footnotes

#6

You can insert anything in the endnotes under the guise of a “fake” endnote.

For a “global” heading, insert a “special” footnote with a space anchor near the beginning of your document, e.g. attach this endnote to the title paragraph.

For a chapter heading in the endnotes, attach the fake footnote to the chapter heading Heading n paragraph, again with a space anchor.

To give these fake endnotes the appearance of headings, apply an adequate paragraph style. Don’t apply directly Heading n because it will create a real mess in the TOC. Instead, create a clone of the used one with a right-click on the name in the side style pane and New. The new style is a duplicate of the original one (and always kept in sync), except in it is not collected in the TOC.

#7

thanks but this is again extremely hacky, I dont understand why it would be like that

I think I got something now.

I try to do this right and work in document chapters, template page breaks etc.

For adding a single header, there seem to be 2 solutions

1. page header / Kopfzeile

page header

At the end of the document insert a special page break, format as “Endnote”, insert a page header and call it what you want.

This works and the endnotes now have a header.

But I dont know how to stop the header from being displayed on every page, if I have many sources.

2. page break and section

I followed this video and did the following:

  1. add a page break, format “endnote”
  2. write the name of the header there, like “sources”
  3. cursor at the end of that word, scroll up to the beginning of that section (i.e. not cover or index)
  4. shift, click, highlight everything
  5. in the insert menu, insert a new Section/ Abschnitt
  6. go to “footnote endnote” tab, and select “collect endnotes below here”

I have no idea why this works

  • why do I need to add a section and a page break? What is the difference?
  • I dont seem to be able to repeat this. I would like to do the same for image sources…
#8

By definition, a header is repeated on every page. Don’t confuse header and heading which are very close words in English. Your purpose is a heading, i.e. a “title” inserted only once.

Endnotes are a generated part of a document. Unfortunately, you can’t interfere at will with this automated process. Your only levers are inserting notes (using manual anchors like a space to visually “erase” it) and applying styles to change the layout. You can’t add up independent text (by independent, I mean not part of an endnote) nor change text flow (e.g. you can’t insert a page break!)

I have not experimented for several headers in the Endnotes group of pages. Perhaps use of fields intercepting variable values could do the trick but I met problems with this in “standard” pages and Endnotes are managed so specifically that I fear failure.

Use of a section is a common workaround against endnotes position. Endnotes are considered the very last “item” of a Writer document while typography tradition allows for other “items” after endnotes such as bibliography or alphabetical index. Present Writer specification forbids this.

You can jail endnotes inside a section. Then you can have other text before or after the section. However, this does not solve all layouts in traditional typography. The workaround also requires to think thoroughly about the structure of the document because these endnotes won’t include notes defined outside it.

And anyway, this does not change the impossibility to have page breaks inside the notes. In the example you mention, the page break is external to the endnotes, which means you probably have a blank page (or vastly blank) before the first endnote.

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#9

LO isn’t conceptually designed to produce research articles formatted according to the variety of standards generally accepted for publication. It can be done more or less with lots of hacky workarounds, but the whole process is suboptimal from a user perspective.

Latex exists for a reason. Sometimes I seriously wonder whether the effort spent in fiddling with LO wouldn’t be better spent learning the fineries of Latex.

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