This is more a technical question than a knowledge based one. I am writing a paper about propaganda relating to the Battle of Trafalgar. One British article claimed that they pulled a report out of a French newspaper about the battle, but there is no record of this report in the French paper. So, I have a statement along of the lines of, "between 21 October and 8 November, the alleged article was not published in the French paper." How do I cite this? Do I put in a single citation for the online newspaper database in general, or do I need to include a URL for every day in the time range?
I apologize if this type of question does not belong here.
"Argyle Smoodleston has claimed [xyz], citing a newspaper article from late October 1805. However, a December 2018 database search of the Vive la France digital archive for October and November 1805 failed to turn up any entry containing the aforesaid^1 report."
( ^1 Aforesaid is a ridiculous word, but I figure me using it instead of something you would actually say means you won't trip any plagiarism detectors accidentally :P).
This CYA in case the article does exist but isn't digitized, or is digitized but not indexed, or something else is funky. You then footnote the URL of the database overall, along with the date accessed.
The point is to allow the reader to follow your citation to the source to replicate it, which the search date, parameters, and URL will do. :)