I had remembered that the preference was to cite the original source as much as possible (which is why the reference count for the Lowry protein assay paper is

I had remembered that the preference was to cite the original source as much as possible (which is why the reference count for the Lowry protein assay paper is reportedly over 300k). The article linked here indirectly mentions this preference: > The problem in this case is that I omit a piece of information: the fact that Larsson’s statement is based on an entirely different source, namely Hamblin (1981). In other words, I am referring to an article that I very well know is a secondary source, and thus hide from my readers the fact that Larsson actually just passed on information published by Hamblin 14 years earlier. A good reason for avoiding the use of secondary sources in academia is that messages that pass through several links have the unfortunate tendency to become modified or altered along the way, as in the whisper game.