I want to cite the following: The purpose of the UK’s Strategic Nuclear Deterrent
Original purpose
The UK’s current strategic nuclear deterrent was developed in the international political and strategic context of the Cold War. Its central purpose, at the time of its procurement in the early 1980s, was to discourage aggression against the UK, its allies and its interests from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact which “had both the perceived capability and assumed intention to expand into Western Europe and elsewhere”.[42] To contemporary decision-makers in the UK, the Cold War offered a compelling justification for the possession of a strategic nuclear deterrent to counter both the actual and developing Soviet military and political threat.
(source:https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmdfence/986/98605.htm#n42)
But the footnote 42 shows " Ev 74 Back"
I have not idea what "Ev"stand for. Please enlighten me how to cite the content of 48 shown above.
That’s a published report of a select committee. Typically, every style guide (if it’s a well-written one) has dedicated rules for this sort of publication. Here (pdf), for instance, is OSCOLA, which covers it.
What you’ve got here is a report issued by the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence — specifically, the Eighth Report it issued during the 2005-06 parliamentary session. The Report was laid before Parliament and printed and published (in hard copy) in January 2006.
At some point — possibly a much later point, I don’t know — a HTML version of the report was made available on the web. They don’t seem to have put too much effort into digitising it; the online report is full of hyperlinks that appear to be dead.
The definitive version of the report is the hard copy version of January 2006. It has the reference HC 835 (at a guess, because it was 835th in a series of publications by the House of Commons in that session).
So if what you want to cite is para 48, I think it would be something like “House of Commons Select Committee on Defence, 2005-06 session, Eighth Report HC 835, para 48”.
Para 48 contains a quote. If what you want to cite is that quote, footnote 42 tells you where the quote comes from. “Ev” means that it comes from evidence given to the Committee in the course of the enquiry that preceded the report. The published copy of the report sets out all the evidence in a giant appendix, and “Ev 74” tells you that this quote comes from page 74 of that appendix.
This is not much help when you’re looking at the HTML versionof the report, since the HTML version is not paginated. But on this page you’ll find a link to a PDF version of the Eighth Report, and if you download that you should be able to find page 74 in the appendix, which should contain the quote included in para 48, and you can see who gave that evidence and when, and whether it was something said in oral testimony before the Committee or in a written submission made to it.