What Is Secondary Citation?

The definition, precisely

A secondary citation — APA's term is indirect citation, MLA's is a quote quoted — is the move for citing material you met inside another source. The in-text marker names both: the original author and the one you read, joined by as cited in (APA 7) or qtd. in (MLA 9). The reference list then carries only the intermediary, because that is the only document you can hand a reader. Citing the original as if you had read it, with no marker, misrepresents the chain.

Every style treats this as a fallback, not a habit. The right fix for a secondary citation is usually a library trip: the original study, book or speech is a database search or an interlibrary-loan request away, and a primary read is stronger evidence. Acceptable uses are narrow — the original is out of print, sits behind a paywall your library lacks, is in a language you cannot read, or is genuinely uncitable, like a lecture quoted in a memoir. One or two of these per paper is normal; a paper built on them signals thin research.

The formulas are short. APA 7: (Okafor, 1998, as cited in Nguyen, 2024), with only Nguyen in the references. MLA 9: name the original in prose if possible, then (qtd. in Nguyen 77). Chicago note style discusses the original within the note of the intermediary you read. Class slides quoting a scholar follow the same rule — the lecture is what you accessed, and many instructors treat lecture content as uncitable anyway. The pattern keeps the chain of custody intact: a reader who wants the original knows exactly whose pages to request, and your reference page never claims a document the paper never opened.

The four mistakes graders see most

Every one of these shows up in a stack of sixty papers — usually more than once. Each pairs the error with the fix, so the table doubles as a pre-submission check.

A worked example

A student reads Nguyen's 2024 article on adolescent sleep and wants the 1998 medication-timing study it quotes. Interlibrary loan produces the 1998 PDF in two days, so she cites Okafor (1998) directly — no marker needed. For a 1974 conference talk that survives only as a quotation inside a 2011 biography, she writes: the 1974 address survives only as quoted in Hale (2011), then cites (Hale, 2011) in the reference list. Two sources, two different treatments, one honest chain. The first citation is stronger, and the second is honest about its limits.

Pattern-match your own draft against this example rather than against the definition: concrete cases transfer better than abstract rules, and the example shows what the rule looks like when it is done right.

How secondary citation differs from its neighbors

A secondary citation is not a secondary source. The source-type question — primary evidence versus commentary on evidence — is about the document's relationship to events; the secondary-citation question is about which document you personally accessed. A diary quoted in a biography is primary material arriving through a secondary citation. The two labels answer different questions and can apply to the same source at once, which is why mixing them up confuses graders more than either error alone. One labels the document's distance from events; the other labels your distance from the document.

Boundary confusion is where most grading deductions live: the term is understood roughly but applied against the wrong neighbor. Pin the boundary above and the term stops being fuzzy in practice, which is what the rubric is actually testing.