Can I place citations in captions using Tufte?

Question

I'm trying to get Tufte marginal material (citations, footnotes, and captions) to support incorporate citations as they do in the Tufte books. What I'm looking for is the "conversational" style that's used in Tufte's books in, for example, notes 36 and 38 on p.70 of Visual Explanations:

These should be generated from something like the following code:

\footnote{\cite{Tooley,Leighly,McLaughlin} The map shown is\cite{Jassonius}, a reissue of\cite{Hondius}, in \cite{Hondius1631} as reproduced in Leighly, plate v. Redrawn.}

\footnote{At far left, \cite{Green}, p. 128, showing an error by the well-known illustrator, Edward Mishell. The extra finger is not needed in performing the manipulation. Unnotced for years, the slip was spotted by Richard Kaufman, who then drew a homage to Mishell's sixth finger--at lear left,\cite{Kaufman}, p. 260.}

Note the same should also apply to \cite within captions, as illustrated on the right in the figure above. Note also that (not shown above) initial citations always appear as full entires, while subsequent ones appear abbreviated, regardless of whether the initial citation was in a simple \cite or in a footnote (even the same footnote).

I've been experimenting with a bibtex-based solution, but (in addition to having some bugs) it generates errors for any attempts to put basic citations in figure captions.

For for example, something like the following

\documentclass[]{tufte-handout}

\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}

This is some text to attach to a figure.
\begin{marginfigure}
\includegraphics[width=1\columnwidth]{...}
\caption{Here is some caption text, and here 
  (\cite{...}) is a citation within that text. }
\end{marginfigure}

\bibliographystyle{unsrtnat}
\bibliography{References}

\end{document}

generates these errors and halts:

! Missing number, treated as zero.
! Illegal unit of measure (pt inserted).
! LaTeX Error: Float(s) lost.

Substituting \citep for \cite runs error-free and produces the expected output (but of, course, does not work for full, initial citations; \bibentry produces even more errors).

Answer 1

This can be made to work easily using biblatex. Simply replace one of the citation commands, e.g.:

\let\citep\footcite

and load biblatex with the options

citestyle=verbose
citecounter=true
citetracker=true

and \citep alone will generate sidenotes, while all others will behave as needed in footnotes and captions (including abbreviating automatically as required). Then

\footnote{\citealt{Tooley,Leighly,McLaughlin} The map shown is\citealt{Jassonius}, a reissue of\citealt{Hondius}, in \citealt{Hondius1631} as reproduced in Leighly, plate v. Redrawn.}

\footnote{At far left, \citealt{Green}, p. 128, showing an error by the well-known illustrator, Edward Mishell. The extra finger is not needed in performing the manipulation. Unnotced for years, the slip was spotted by Richard Kaufman, who then drew a homage to Mishell's sixth finger--at lear left,\citealt{Kaufman}, p. 260.}

will produce exactly the output sought (while using \citep in main text can still be used to generate "regular" footnote citations).