Introduction

An indirect (or secondary) source is when one author references or quotes the work of a second author, and you are interested in referencing or quoting that second author from the first author's work. It is always best to find and cite the original work for simplicity, and to have access to the full context of the second author's ideas in their original work. If you cannot find the original work, here is how you cite a source that is referenced in another source: 

• If you quote an author’s quotation of a source you did not personally consult, put the abbreviation qtd. in (for "quoted in") before the source you cite in your parenthetical citation (284).
• If the sources involved have multiple authors, follow the rules for in-text and works cited for multiple authors.

Parenthetical (in-text)

Example 1: Maryanne Wolf has quoted Marcel Proust in her work

As Marcel Proust reminisced: "There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those . . . we spent with a favourite book" (qtd. in Wolf 6).

Example 2: W.W. Norton and Company has tweeted a quote from Billy Ray Belcourt

An excerpt from Billy Ray Belcourt’s debut novel reads “I needed to insist on a form of gender that wasn’t a natural disaster but rather a sprawling field where nothing was a coffin someone could fall into” (qtd. in W.W.Norton & Company).

Works cited

Example 1:

Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story of the Reading Brain. Harper, 2007.

Example 2:

W.W.Norton & Company [@wwnorton]. "I needed to insist on a form of gender that wasn’t a natural disaster but rather a sprawling field where nothing was a coffin someone could fall into." Read an excerpt from @BillyRayB's debut novel A MINOR CHORUS at @lithub. wwnorton.com/books/A-Minor-Chorus.” Twitter, 24 Oct. 2022, 9:36 a.m., twitter.com/wwnorton/status/1584584658162831365.