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It is good practice is to avoid secondary referencing

Watch video on secondary referencing

Imagine you are reading a blog post from 2021 called ‘Creating a Forest Food Garden: Higher Education that is disruptive by Design’, written by Perpetua Kirby, John Parry and Daphne Lambert.  

It is located on the British Educational Research Association (BERA) website. You want to include the following information from the blog in your assignment. How would you reference this? 

Paradoxically, this requires a slowing down to attend to feelings and perspectives as a means to identify what to transform together in response to the urgency of the environmental crisis (Kirby & Webb, 2021).  

It is good practice in this situation to find the article written by Kirby and Webb (the primary source).  

You can then read it directly and paraphrase the point they are making. This means you can also include their article as an in-text citation and in your reference list in the normal way. 

It is not accurate to paraphrase or quote the highlighted sentence and cite it as being the words of Kirby and Webb when you haven’t read their article.  

The highlighted sentence is actually an interpretation of their words by the authors of the blog (which we would refer to as the secondary source). 

How to include a secondary reference if you need to 

If you are unable to find a primary source to check the information yourself, you can include what is called a secondary reference, which is fully transparent about where the information came from.  

Secondary references should be kept to a minimum in your assignment. 

Check your specific referencing style for how to format a secondary reference, the example below uses APA referencing style: 

In-text citation for the above example 
 

Kirby and Webb (2021, as cited in Kirby et al., 2021) suggest that …  

or 

… (Kirby & Webb, 2021, as cited in Kirby et al., 2021) 

Your reference list would just include the Kirby et al. blog, as this is the source you have actually read.