you ever click on an article quoted in a tumblr post because you wanna verify that it says what it purports to say, and while reading the article, youre like okay, its odd for an article published in 2023 to be relying on a 2016 stat that is surveyed by a government body annually so you click on the link to that and instead of taking you to the 2016 survey, it links to a dissertation written in 2022, but okay whatever its probably quoted in this dissertation, so you ctrl F and type in the stat to make sure and okay it does so you scroll down to the references so you can just copy and paste the survey reference into google scholar, but the survey isnt in the references, so you scroll back up and read the paragraph the stat was quoted in to see that this dissertation is quoting the stat from a different paper that quotes it, so you take note of that paper and scroll back down and okay theres two references that match this, so back up you scroll and its not made clear in the paragraph which of the two theyre quoting, and oh my god do i have to read 15 pages of this dissertation to be able to figure out which quotes the stat from the survey, 15 pages, mind you, of the dissertation that an article - that i was originally reading to verify a tumblr post - sources for a stat taken from a government survey rather than the survey itself.