I subscribe to a number of different academic subrebbits, and this semester, I feel like I've seen a lot of questions on a number of the "Ask" ones (e.g., "AskAcademia," "AskLiteraryStudies," "AskProfessors") about whether it's okay for an academic writer to cite someone's citation of someone else, rather than dig back into that original source themself.
There are two ways to think about this question. The first is that can you do this? And the answer to this is pretty simple: yes. I don't know how it goes for other citation formats, but in MLA you do this by putting "qtd. in" in your parenthetical citation and then indicating where you found your quotation; the best practice is that the signal phrase should indicate who actually said it. Here's an example from own eternally in progress book:
In an 1872 letter to an unknown correspondent, Charles Kinglsey vented his frustration at the way many men of science excluded men of religion: “There are many men – I among them – who love physical science as dearly as Spencer and Tyndall can; who are ready to follow Darwin… without the least fear. But when it is said to us. No. You shall not be a scientific man and a Xtian… then, I think, an honest man has a right to lose his temper deliberately, and use a few hard words” (qtd. in Conlin 123).
The signal phrase makes it clear that Kingsley is who said this, but the parenthetical makes it clear that to find this quotation, you will need to go to Conlin. Then, if you go to the Works Cited (which I've included at the bottom of this post), you can see where I actually got the quotation from.
So this achieves the two goals of every citation: giving credit, and providing documentation.
But as a wise man once said, "Just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing" (Meyer and Martin qtd. in 137th Gebirg). There a couple problems that "qtd. in" is prone to, and a couple circumstances in which it is definitely warranted.
First, you are trusting that the source you read gets it right.
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| Charles Kingsley and his wife |
This isn't always the case! Even among academics, sources can be misquoted, or even if quoted correctly, they can get the context wrong. For example, in his The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), Francis Darwin (Charles's son) quotes a letter from Charles Kingsley to Charles Darwin saying, "I have to thank you for the unexpected honour of your book [the Origin]. That the Naturalist whom, of all naturalists living, I most wish to know and to learn from, should have sent a scientist like me his book, encourages me at least to observe more carefully, and perhaps more slowly" (81). This is quoted all over the place. When I read this, I was surprised—would Kingsley really call himself a scientist, especially back in 1859 before the word really took off?
So I tracked down the letter in the Darwin Correspondence Project, where we find that Kinglsey actually says, "a sciolist like me" (emphasis mine). A sciolist is, as the OED tells us, a "person whose knowledge is only superficial, esp. one who makes much of it; a pretender to learning"; this is a far more likely thing for Kingsley to be calling himself. But searching "'charles kingsley' 'a scientist like me'" gets 1,490 hits on Google, whereas "'charles kingsley' 'a sciolist like me'" gets seven! That 1887 Francis Darwin misquotation has been endlessly reproduced and requoted by people who have not checked the original. (Both formulations get exactly three hits in Google Scholar, however, so professional academic have been more careful.)
Second, you may not be giving adequate intellectual credit (or not making an original contribution).
The most obvious form of plagiarism is, as everyone knows, taking someone else's language without credit. But it's also plagiarism (as, in my experience, many students do not know) to take someone else's ideas without proper credit. This actually recently happened to me; I was asked to peer review an article about a novel (let's call it "novel A") that I had published about myself. The paper I reviewed took another text (let's call it "essay B") and applied it to novel A—the exact same second text that I had been the first to apply to novel A. It cited me, but only in the sense that the citations didn't actually quote essay B themselves, they quoted my quotations (e.g., qtd. in Mollmann).
Now is this plagiarism in the sense of borrowing language without attribution? No. But I do think it was pretty fishy. One, it was my idea to bring these two texts together, and nothing in the article I peer reviewed made that clear, I was just cited as the source of quotations for essay B. There was a failure to adequately give credit for a comparison that only I had thought of, even if none of my language had been stolen. Furthermore, I did the work of picking out the relevant passages from both novel A and essay B, but received no credit for it. (The writer clearly had not read essay B themselves, because they quoted nothing from it that I hadn't.)
Second, even if adequate credit had been given... what's the point? If they don't go back to that original source themselves, they are entirely dependent on my interpretation, and thus cannot be making much of an original intellectual contribution—which is the whole point of academic writing. Even if I was credited, someone else had already had the idea of pairing novel A with essay B. Why do I want to read someone else making the exact same combination of texts, using the exact same selection of passages?
For me, this is the real issue with not going back to the original source. If one writer pulls a line that's important to them out of a source, I don't need a second writer to re-pull that same line. I want to know what the second writer thinks is important to their point.
So when is it a good idea to use "qtd. in"?
I searched my book manuscript for uses of "qtd. in" in order to write this post, and discovered that I use it thirteen times in 424 pages. My uses fall into two main categories:
First, when the original source isn't readily available. This is, I believe, the case with the Kingsley letter I quoted via Conlin above. (It has been a long time, so I'm not 100% sure, but I do feel sure I would have quoted the original if I could have.) Some sources just can't be easily accessed: they are letters that have never been reprinted or periodicals that have never been digitized and are only available in some archive in another country. This makes you entirely dependent on someone else... but what else can you do? In a quick skim of my "qtd. in"s, I would guess this accounts for more than half of them.
Second, when you are working with a secondary source, but you also want to provide some detail by quoting its quotation of a primary source. There must be a more elegant way of putting that, but let me provide some examples. For one, here's a passage where I'm discussing the work of my academic grandfather, George Levine:
Levine examines how self-abnegation figures into epistemology beginning in the 1830s, both within literature and within the work of actual scientists, drawing on the writing of scientists such as Tyndall who claimed “a self-renunciation that has something lofty in it… is often enacted in the private experience of the true votary of science” (qtd. in Levine 4). Levine does not examine any specific discipline, but examines both scientists and scientist-like figures during the Victorian period to see how self-abnegation functions as a narrative: how does science create a narrative of self-abnegation, and how do literary narratives incorporate self-abnegation?
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| Social Darwinism: "There's always a bigger fish" (Lucas qtd. in benjay2345). |
Yes, I'm quoting Tyndall, but here I'm quoting Tyndall in order to elucidate something about the Levine passage where he quotes Tyndall. Thus, I think I'm doing a better job of giving Levine credit if I make it clear that this is his quotation of Tyndall that supports his point. Similarly, when discussing social Darwinism in the novel Zalma (1895), I draw on the ideas of Mike Hawkins:
But this is not purposeless violence; an important keystone of Darwinism was “that social conflict (at least in certain guises) could be presented… as the motor of progress” (Hawkins 146). Applying this kind of evolutionary vision to humankind leads Pahlen to anticipate some of the Darwinist writers who would come after Zalma. The German general Friedrich von Bernhardi would write in 1912, “Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war. War gives a biologically just decision” (qtd. in Hawkins 209), and the socialist writer La Monte argued in 1917, “Let us… assert the necessity and efficacy of cataclysmic revolution!” (113)
In this case, I think it's important to show that Bernhardi is Hawkins's own example of the idea he's discussing, though I also supplement them with my own example pulled from La Monte.
On the other hand, if you read a source that points you to another source, and you end up taking stuff from the second source that the first source did not, and don't use any of the ideas of the first source, I don't think there's any obligation to cite the first source. Yes, it was nice of that first source to lead you somewhere useful, but I would argue that it didn't make an intellectual contribution to your piece.
So... can you just depend on someone else's citation, and cite them? Well, sure, you can. But is it always the best choice? I don't think so. Like many aspects of writing, it's about context.
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