Citing a source that another author cites

[xypathos]

I'm in the process of writing a longer research paper and have a question regarding the citation of a source within a source. A situation where I'm reading Source-A who cites Source-B directly (directly being defined as a quote or a summary of a quote that I can nail down to a specific section without any extra scholarship from Source-A).

Do I cite only Source-A, even if I've verified that the text in B is accurate? Or, do I just attribute it to B?

In past papers I've erred on the side of caution and cited A but I've had professors get on to me, telling me to cite B. I've also tried the "as cited by A, found in B" approach but told that it makes citations cumbersome.

I'll be using Chicago, and my professor is out of touch over the holiday. While I'll await a reply from him before finalizing any work, I'm curious as to how others have handled similar situations.

My school/department doesn't have an agreed upon citation style but they also take citation mishaps very seriously and expel pretty liberally for them. So it's something I want to tread lightly with.

[fuzzylogician]

If you've found B and verified the original source, I'd just cite that. There is no need to mention that you got there because you saw it mentioned in A. Obviously this is different if you can't get to the original, and that's how I understand it when people write "(B, as cited in A)," and I always take that with a grain of salt.

[Eigen]

And in general, you want to avoid citing B instead of A whenever possible. 

 

Citing someone who cites someone else is problematic, you want to go for the original source as often as you can. 

[Vene]

Cite the original source and then read this. Not hunting down the original source lead to the "fact" that bacterial cells outnumber the number of human cells in the body, but in reality there is no evidence to confirm this assertion. Instead, an estimate was quoted as fact and then people got lazy and didn't track down and read the original paper.

[ashiepoo72]

In Chicago style, you could structure a footnote something like this: John Doe, The Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 10, quoted in Blah Blah Blah, ed. Jane Doe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 55.

 

Of course, it's always best to go to the original source, like everyone else has already said. If for whatever reason it's not feasible, however, you should cite in a way that shows you're pulling a quotation from a quotation within a book.

 

Here's a decent website that explains it: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/03

Edited November 27, 2014 by ashiepoo72

[xypathos]

Thank you all.

I suspected that citing the "ultimate source" is ideal when I'm able to prove its accuracy, just wanted to be sure.

I guess I was just worried about some perceived misrepresentation when I didn't find the source through my own research but rather through someone else. So I was unsure if I should acknowledge that someone led me to a certain point. Though I do see the eventual problem if we followed that process, "as cited by D, who cited C, who cited B, as originally stated by A."

[dr. t]

In Chicago style, you could structure a footnote something like this: John Doe, The Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 10, quoted in Blah Blah Blah, ed. Jane Doe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 55.

 

 

This is the best practice.

Edited November 28, 2014 by telkanuru