Superscript citations with letters to denominate different pages

Question

I've been using natbib in my thesis with the 'author year' citation style. By far the most common way of doing citations in my field of study is superscript, so I want to change to natbib's super option. I've used the functionality in natbib that allows page numbers to be added to a citation: \citep[p. 104]{Eamon1994} gives [Eamon, 1994, p. 104].

However, when I switch to [super]{natbib} This results in texttexttext¹ p. 104. What I would like is to have something like this: texttexttext^1a, and then have the different letters in the bibliography with the page numbers (or intervals) they represent:

William Eamon. Science and the Secrets of Nature. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1994. a: p. 104, b: p. 189, c: p. 254-261.

I've seen one solution to this in the Superscript page numbers with natbib thread. Jan gave an answer that works if you write \cite[a]{Eamon1994}, which produces this^1a, but you have to manually write every letter and page number into the BibTeX entry. Is there any way of doing this automatically? I still only have 20-30 entries in my bibliography, so if this is something that can be done in biblatex I would be interested to know.

Answer 1

The short answer here is 'no', as the two parts of the process are essentially separate. The bibliographic entry is produced purely from the .bib file, while any notes are only 'available' where the citation is used. Even with biblatex doing things directly looks extremely tricky: you'd need some form of custom field in the bibliography linked to a custom counter for the sub-letters.

Quite apart from the technical issues, I wonder about how much this is a 'good idea'. I've never seen refs given in the way you suggest, and there is an argument that 'page numbers are not bibliographic information', i.e. they don't belong in the bibliography. Normally, when you do see references to individual pages in a book in the way you suggest, each reference is separate or they are of the form

1. William Eamon. Science and the Secrets of Nature. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1994
2. Ref. 1, p. 104