Hi all，
I have the following situation: I read a scholarly secondary source and find a reference to an archival source. I track down the source and read it myself and then decide to use it myself. If I have tracked down and read the source myself, can I just directly cite the primary source without mentioning the secondary work I originally found the reference to the source in?
So far it seems to me that it is fine to just cite the primary source (and that is what I have done so far) :
The Chicago Manual says that citing of the primary source is preferred and authors are asked to track down and cite the primary source. In that case, the manual does not seem to suggest that citing the secondary literature where the reference was originally found is necessary.
As a graduate student, one is often given the advice of looking at other secondary literature to get an idea what kind of sources might be useful for one's own work. If this is a common practice amongst historians but reference to where one has originally found the source, then one would expect to see footnotes also referencing the secondary work where authors first found the reference. However, this does not seem to be the case.
Finally, what happens to me often is that after looking up the original source I find other bits or quotes that are interesting and use. So the content of the source I use is not identical anymore with the bits of the source that the original secondary source I found it in did.
This is my understanding so far, but would be very curious to know what you think.
It's only important to cite things that are relevant. In a paper, what's relevant is presenting a thesis, through argument and evidence. How you arrived at those arguments or found that evidence is not usually relevant; you're not telling a story about yourself.
In a paper, the reader should be lead down a clear and lucid chain of reasoning and argument to hopefully reach the conclusions of the author. That may give the impression of being how the author him/herself arrived at those conclusions but it is emphatically not. The actual research is full of false starts, confusion, dead-end leads and red-herrings, random inspiration and dumb luck. But that's not what you write about. You should always strive to keep things relevant, clear and succinct.
Now, secondary sources can be relevant. I mean, if you're analyzing the notes of Thomas Jefferson that'd been found scrawled inside the margins of some of his books, then citing/crediting the person who discovered those notes would be a better idea than just citing the books, as relevant background information and for the sake of giving due credit.
When it comes to quotes, primary sources are always to be preferred to "cited in.." types of citations. But primary sources aren't always better. If you're for instance discussing a text that exists in multiple different manuscripts, it'd be wiser to cite a critical edition that analyzes and compares the different manuscripts than citing any single manuscript (unless you really are talking about that manuscript specifically). Even though the edition is technically a secondary source.
But in most cases it's not relevant how you found a primary source. If I want to show that Shakespeare knew the word "anchovies", then it suffices to cite Henry IV part I, where he uses it. Whether I found that out by reading the play, or seeing it on stage, or the Oxford English Dictionary, or a concordance of Shakespeare's words, or just a guy on the street, is all irrelevant to the point. But if I want to make the point that it only occurs in that play then a concordance is what you need to cite.
To add on to what u/Platypuskeeper has said, let me give you one bit of practical advice: If you're unsure of how your professor or program wants you to cite things, ask them before you turn anything in. People have sometimes specific rules for citations or preferences for how to cite things which are sometimes somewhat different from what style manuals would say, and so if you're unsure, check with whoever is grading your work (or can get you hauled off to the provost for plagiarism).