Citation style customization together with manual bibliography entry

Question

How can I make a small modification to the style of citation numbering (i.e., for the \cite command) in a LaTeX document while at the same time using a bibliography management system that supports manual entry of bibliography entries? (To my knowledge, BibTeX and BibLaTeX do not support this, as it runs counter to their philosophy of automated bibliography creation. If they do support this, I would accept that as an alternative answer to my question.) Specifically, I want the citation numbers to be superscript: the default looks like

[2]

and I would like

[²]

instead.

My question is distinct from the question of changing the style of the \bibitem labels; this is easy to do by redefining \@biblabel, and I would hope that there is a similarly easy solution for changing citation numbers.

(I'm translating a document and trying to replicate the original style as closely as possible. It's easier to just copy the old bibliography entries than to identify a bibliography style that matches them, if one exists at all.)

Answer 1

Depending on whether you want the brackets in the superscript or outside you can use

\makeatletter
\def\@cite#1#2{[\hbox{\@textsuperscript{\normalfont #1}}]}
\makeatother

or

\makeatletter
\def\@cite#1#2{\hbox{\@textsuperscript{\normalfont [#1]}}}
\makeatother

The former places the brackets around the superscript to yield

[¹]

while the latter places the brackets in the superscript to yield

^[2]

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Alternatively you can load natbib with the options square and super

\usepackage[square,super]{natbib}