I realised that the question of \cite has come up before, but I have a case that's quite common in my field and wondered what the best solution is. When writing with the SBL style guide, it's not uncommon to want to generate a footnote like this one:

5. Carl D. Gross, “Is There Any Interest in Nehemiah 5,” Scand. J.OldTestam. 11 (1997): 270–78, doi:10.1080/ 09018329708585120. Fensham translates as “Everyone of you imposes a burden (loan) on his brother,” but gives no philological commentary on this, perhaps because he reads the whole episode as being primarily about slavery rather than debt (Fensham, The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, 192).

Because footnotes are so common, this approach to summarising a parenthetical issue is also very common. In author-date citation styles (which I used to use for other work) you'd get the citation in the main paragraph body, and then a separate footnote, and hence no problems.

In LaTeX, the desired result can be generated by

\cite{Gross:1997}. Fensham blah blah \autocite[192]{Fensham1982}.

I don't know how to get the same effect from Pandoc. The problem is that the following:

^[@Gross:1997. Fensham blah blah [@Fensham:1982]]

turns the first into \textcite{}, which in the SBL style is set as:

Gross ("Is there…" …)

Which is what \textcite is supposed to do. \autocite{} produces instead (Gross, "Is there…" …), which also seems the best option — it parallels what one wants with \autocite in a non-footnote paragraph.

Is there any chance of altering the syntax slightly to allow other options in the conversion to LaTeX? What I'd really like is the ability to generate \cite{}, which would also be useful in other cases (e.g. one is writing a sentence in footnote text such as "For a bibliography, see Fensham, blah bah, 1982." where one does not want \parencite{}).

Or if anyone can suggest a workaround I'm open to ideas.

Best,

Lyndon