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When writing a paper where you are citing from another paper which uses a different citation style, how should one cite portions of text that contain in-text citations? For example

“Malnutrition has often been referred to as “the skeleton in the hospital closet”, as it is often overlooked, under-diagnosed, and untreated [69,70].Despite this, the negative consequences of malnutrition have been widely reported..." (Barker, Grout & Crowe, 2011).

An alternative format would be

"Malnutrition has often been referred to as "the skeleton in the hospital closet" , as it is often overlooked, under-diagnosed, and untreated (McKee, 2011; Busby, 2008; in Barker, Grout, & Crowe, 2011). Despite this...."( Barker, Grout, & Crowe, 2011).

This seems an awkward and redundant solution. Would this be considered correct for APA style? What about other citation styles; MLA,etc.?

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    Are you quoting their text verbatim? If yes, is [69, 70] going to be of any use to the reader?
    – gerrit
    Sep 27, 2013 at 22:53
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    Coming from the standpoint of logic, I'd translate the quotation's references to your own style and put those references in your bibliography. The other option could be to say "Citing Smith (2011), Barker, Grout & Crowe (2011) state that 'malnutrition has often been referred to...'. Thus, removing the awkward references from the quotation.
    – Moriarty
    Sep 27, 2013 at 23:39

2 Answers 2

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Echoing the other good comments and answer, I'd encourage you to think in terms of "forthrightness", rather than compliance to semi-random formal criteria. Think of the function of your citations, and thinking of the idealized version of scholarship and such. The goal is not conformity to style guides, but useful contributions to human knowledge, blah-blah-blah, ;) But, yes, that should be the way to think about such questions.

To my taste, citations in-line should be sufficient so that the reader does not have to "flip to the end" to see what "[46]" is. The space spent on fuller references is a good investment!!!

That is, yet again, if one thinks that the function of one's writing is to help the reader, all in-line references would be optimally helpful, as opposed to "proper-and-possibly-unhelpful".

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Why not rephrase it, and quote each source properly? Like this:

McKee (2011), Busby (2008) and in Barker, Grout, & Crowe (2011) wrote that “Malnutrition has often been referred to as 'the skeleton in the hospital closet', as it is often overlooked, under-diagnosed, and untreated". To this, in Barker, Grout & Crowe added that "Despite this, the negative consequences of malnutrition have been widely reported...".

In a way, you are quoting McKee at al., so it is only proper to cite them properly, and thus have them in your references.

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    If you use the right bibtex package, you can instead do the second citation as Barker, Grout & Crowe (2011) automatically. It reads better.
    – Suresh
    Mar 4, 2014 at 3:36
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    @Suresh I'm not so sure that the OP is using TeX.
    – Federico Poloni
    Mar 4, 2014 at 8:15
  • Nevertheless, "(McKee 2011) wrote X" is (common) bad style for "McKee (2011) wrote X". How to support the right style with software is a separate problem. I've queued up an edit.
    – Blaisorblade
    Jun 15, 2017 at 12:17
  • @Blaisorblade My answer kept the OP's citation style, which is not the topic here. I think that changing it drags some of the attention away from the point of my answer.
    – Vedran Šego
    Jun 15, 2017 at 13:07
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    @VedranŠego That's the same citation style; in that style, some rephrasings (like the one you did) require adjusting citations. The OP's citations are correct. See answers to academia.stackexchange.com/q/16598/8966.
    – Blaisorblade
    Jun 15, 2017 at 13:36

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