@sennierer told me that the APIS’ API is capable of doing just that.
On click on "create" that would result in
- creating an entity of the respective type
- using the data from e.g. GND as a starting point (effectively mimicking the behaviour of "Create from reference resource" in the APIS-webapp)
- and adding the link to the created entity in the .docx (which is the current behaviour)
This would be advisable as we intend to amend the data anyway if needed (which is more frequent than not).
This way the resulting .docx would only contain links to the local instance, and not a mix of local stuff and different authority file sources.