How to Cite a Quote Within a Quote (Secondary Sources)

The 'as cited in' pattern, precisely

APA 7's rule: your in-text citation names both authors but your reference list names only the source on your desk. Reading a Jones (2024) textbook that quotes a 2020 Smith study, the in-text form is (Smith, 2020, as cited in Jones, 2024) — Smith gets a year because the quoted material is Smith's, but no Smith entry goes in the references, because you never read Smith. Quoting directly? The page number belongs to Jones's book: (Smith, 2020, as cited in Jones, 2024, p. 87).

MLA 9 compresses this to (qtd. in Jones 24), where 24 is the page in Jones. Both systems share the underlying logic: a citation is a retrieval address, and you can only vouch for sources you actually possess. Instructors enforce this because fabricated chains — citing Freud directly when you read a Psychology Today summary — break the audit trail that makes scholarship checkable.

The numbers at a glance

Quote-within-a-quote, style by style — the range, and where each row actually shows up in coursework. Skim it first; the sections below explain why the range exists and which row applies to you.

When secondary citation is acceptable — and when it is lazy

Legitimate uses are real and bounded: the original is out of print, in a language you cannot read, or genuinely unavailable through your library. A classic case is quoting primary historical material available only inside an edition or archive collection. In those cases the as-cited-in form is correct and expected, and most instructors cap how often it appears rather than banning it.

What the form should never become is a shortcut: citing studies via textbooks and news summaries because reading the original felt optional. Each secondary layer risks distortion — summaries compress, headlines exaggerate, textbook authors simplify. If more than two or three of your citations are as-cited-in, the grader's comment is predictable: go to the originals. The fifteen-minute database search that finds the real study is the highest-return quarter hour in student research.

Nesting marks: double, single, and the British exception

American convention: double quotation marks for your quote, single marks for any quotation inside it — 'Freud's phrase “narcissism of small differences” appears in Jones's chapter.' Reverse for British convention, where singles sit outside and doubles within; some UK style guides are strict about it. APA 7 and MLA 9 both follow the American pattern, so the single-inside-double rule governs most student work in the US.

Block quotes (40+ words in APA, more than four lines in MLA) drop the quotation marks entirely and take indentation instead — and a quote inside a block quote takes double marks, since the block's nesting level is carried by the indent. One direction not to nest: three levels deep (a quote, inside a quote, inside a quote) means you are citing an edition of an edition of an edition — find a better source rather than formatting the nesting.

Chasing the original: the 15-minute protocol

Most 'unavailable originals' are one search away. Protocol: take the quoted author, year and a distinctive phrase from the quote; search Google Scholar; if the paper exists, your library's link resolver gets the PDF in two clicks. For books, WorldCat and the HathiTrust index cover a century of print. If the original genuinely does not exist in accessible form — archival material, out-of-print foreign-language work — the as-cited-in citation is your honest fallback.

The habit pays beyond formatting: originals contain context that summaries strip. A textbook's two-sentence summary of a study cannot tell you the sample size was 14 or the effect appeared in only one condition — details that change whether the source supports your claim. Students who chase originals routinely discover the secondary source was misquoting, which is exactly the kind of finding that turns a routine citation question into the sharpest paragraph in the paper.

Three minutes to a clean citation

Edge-case citations punish hesitation, not ignorance: the student who spends twenty minutes googling a no-author format loses more time to doubt than the format ever costs. Decide the pattern once — title moves forward, organization counts as author, n.d. when no date exists anywhere — and apply it mechanically. Consistency across your list matters more to graders than perfect recall of manual arcana.

Automate what's mechanical. The citation generator below formats journal articles, books, chapters and websites in all three major styles, including the awkward cases on this page. Paste the metadata, copy the output, done — the minutes you save belong to analysis, which is where rubric points actually live. Cross-check in-text forms against the table above and the reference list is submission-ready.