Sometimes it's just an attempt to do the due diligence of citing the primary reference rather than the reference that cited the reference that cited the primary reference. I experienced this recently with a very widely cited basic fact in a very hard to come by technical report from the early 80s. I'd have bet dollars to cents it did in fact contain the statement everyone claimed it did.. however, just in case I made an inter-library loan request to actually read those couple sentences.
> Sometimes it's just an attempt to do the due diligence of citing the primary reference rather than the reference that cited the reference that cited the primary reference.
True, but in this case you should include both references.
