Problem

There does not seem to be a straight forward way to manage references in a scientific text.[1-3] While simple references[1] may be managed by bending the cross-reference tool[2] more advanced referencing situations[1,3] are not easily dealt with.

Suggestion

In the raw text, cite-keys can be inserted. The cite-keys are unique identifiers for the text entries (either in a table at the end of the document or in a separate bibtext file). Then a relatively simple functionality that basically does search-and-replace work could do the rest. Search for the first cite-key in the document, replace all its occurrences with 1. If there is already a table at the end of the document that contains all the references in the format

[cite-key] Formatted Reference

Nothing else needs to be done and that would be an acceptable solution. If the references are in a bibtext file they need to be imported and formatted.

Then search for the second cite-key, replace that with 2 and so on.

If all cite-keys are replaced, go again through the text to find things like

... text.[1,2,3] While ...

and rectify it to

...text.[1-3] While...

Finally, sort the table at the end of the document by increasing reference number.

Indeed, this will be my simple (and unfortunately manual) work-flow.

References
[1] The author of this article, in this article, just now.
[2] https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/indesign/using/cross-references.html, may no longer be valid
[3] The author of this article again, in this article, a bit later.