Should citations on PowerPoint slides be shortened?

Question

Are there guidelines or best practices for adding references to a research PowerPoint presentation?

For example, should I put the full citation at the bottom of the slide?

Liu, J., Rinzler, A. G., Dai, H., Hafner, J. H., Bradley, R. K., Boul, P. J., Smalley, R. E. (1998). Fullerene Pipes. Science, 280(5367), 1253–1256.

If you have even a couple references, this slide starts to look really busy.

I've seen quite a few presentations with truncated references (just first author, journal, year), like so:

Liu, J., et al. Science (1998)

Is this shortened reference alright? It looks cleaner on the slide, but at the expense of the ease of the viewer locating a reference. Any other solutions? If it makes a difference, this would be for the engineering/science fields.

Answer 1

I would strongly recommend against putting the full citation at the bottom of the slide. The problem is, when you are actually presenting, it will both a) make the slide look very busy as you note, and b) distract people away from the rest of the slide. Another problem is that few people will actually be able to copy down the citation (unless you linger on the slide for a very long time).

Truncated references deal with all of these problems, generally giving just enough information for a quickly scribbled note that will give the reader the ability to track down the cited paper with a little bit of work.

In addition, however, if you will be making the slides available for others to read at their leisure, there are two other good places to put references:

1. A "bibliography" slide at the end, before or after where many put the funding/acknowledgements slide.
2. In the "notes" field associated with the slide on which the truncated reference appears.

This is especially good when dealing with funding agencies, who like to pull slides out of your deck for presentation to their own higher-ups.

Answer 2

I generally agree with the sentiments already mentioned (that is, avoid putting full citations on individual slides; there is usually a better way to handle it). That said, I occasionally find myself wanting to do so for some reason, such as when I'm likely to reuse the presentation a year from now, and want to easily recall where the quoted information came from, or when I want to have the full citation available on the screen in case I'm asked about it during my presentation.

When this has been the case, I've often handled this by including a full citation, but I use a color that is very similar to the background color of the slide – perhaps a light gray if my background is white, for example – and make the font very small.

Here's an example, the slide on the left has a reference, while the slide on the right has the same reference in a more "subdued" color and smaller font:

This allows me to put the reference on the slide when I want to, but avoid having the reference be a distraction to the live audience.

Answer 3

My preferred way to do this is to put a short reference on the slide, perhaps not even a formatted citation (e.g. "Liu, et al. show that ..."), maybe use a numeric cite (e.g. "...[1]"), and then have a slide or two at the end listing your citations, in full form, as taken from the paper that the talk represents or will represent if the talk is discussing a work in progress. This moves the distracting stuff to the end of the talk and allows anyone who wants to go look up the citation to do so assuming you or the conference makes your slides available.

If you don't intend to make the slides available, then putting a short cite like your second example in a footnote on the slide where you first cite it is probably best. That's short enough to be remembered or jotted down by an audience member for later look up.

Answer 4

Don't put a full citation on the slide. That's too busy and distracting. It will distract some members of the audience from your main message.

Personally, I recommend against putting citations on the slide at all, in most circumstances. Many people adopt a text-heavy style, where their presentations are full of text and bullet lists with text and text text wall-of-text. There's a lot of evidence that this is not good for comprehension.

Instead, try minimizing the amount of text on your slides. It takes more effort, but it can lead to much more effective communication style. Try to write less on your slides. Less is more.

Finally, remember the goal of a presentation. The purpose of a presentation is not to present every last detail of your work. Instead, the purpose of a presentation is to tell a story, a narrative, that conveys the main ideas and intuition and takeaways. Details belong in the technical paper. And citations are typically one of those things that belong in the technical paper. When you're preparing a presentation, you shouldn't try to "cover" everything in the technical paper. Instead, think of your presentation as a lecture where you teach people about some idea, or an advertisement to read the full paper.

Answer 5

Just to add perspective and context, D.W.’s approach is good for exactly what he asserts – “a live presentation to a group of folks that conveys the main ideas and intuition and takeaways”.

However, with more presentations being presented online via courses or other means, citations are imperative. In particular, where images or other media are being used. In order to responsibly address copyright and fair use, the presenter must give a reasonable citation on every slide where they use media that isn’t theirs.

The options J.R. offers are excellent ones for just this purpose – the aesthetics are attended to as well as the obligation to cite work used in a presentation that could possibly be distributed beyond the intended audience. While the most common presentation is still “live”, as we move forward into the uncharted territory of conventional tools – like Powerpoint – being accessed online, we will have to find better ways to protect the integrity of the media we use to support our efforts.