How to make a PowerPoint presentation from a research paper?

Academic presentations could be based on research in progress, unfinished work or the full drafts of a research paper. An academic presentation is a sort of like an advertisement for the paper than an attempt to present all the information in the paper. You need to focus on what is important, highlighting the bold outcomes and results is the key here. The below format is a very basic design showing you how to make a PowerPoint presentation from a research paper:

• Introduction (1 slide)
• Research Questions/Hypotheses (1 slide)
• Literature Review/Theory (1 slide)
• Methods & Data Collection (1 slide)
• Data Presentation/Findings (3-5 slides)
• Conclusion (1 slide)

Obviously, this is just a general guideline. It is however important that you focus on your findings, future implication of your work and limitation since it is the potential for future research. During a presentation method and data collection sections should be kept short. Though, this all depends on the nature of the work.

To create a presentation from a full-length paper or article, you can pull out the most important parts of the article, based on the above list or based on the subheadings in your own article.

For the introduction, you can use the same compelling introduction you use in your paper. In the PowerPoint presentation, it is a good idea to find a picture that describes the aim of your research. Visuals are considered very effective tools for keeping the audience interested and for conveying a point.

Your next slide should contain your research questions mentioned in your introduction as well.

Then, spend no more than a minute contextualizing your research questions and project within the literature. Don’t make the mistake of spending too much time reviewing what others have written about your topic. You just want to illustrate the fact that your work contributes to existing research in the field. People don’t come to conferences to hear literature reviews, they want new information and mind-blowing findings. They want to see the real implications of the findings to the global challenges at hand.   The concrete practical solutions.

Think about the questions people might have such as: what data set did you use? How many interviews did you carry out? How many months of participant observation did you complete? What is the timeframe for the data? The geographical observations. Give just enough information to validate your findings for the methodology section.

You should be able to go through all of the above in the first five minutes so that you can spend as much of your time as possible sharing the rich detail of your own data and analyses. If you have ethnographic data, you can tell one story from the field for each point you want to make. For statistical data, you can present a table with findings for each finding you wish to highlight. For interview data, you can use one interview quotes for each theme you plan to highlight.

Once you bold out the significant findings, you can leave a minute or two for your conclusion. Again make sure you use visuals, story format, case studies, quotes, even videos to explain your result to make it very appealing to the audience.

As you make each slide, remember to put a few words as possible on each slide, and place an image on each slide to convey your points visually.