How to Create Effective Research Presentation: Examples and Tips

A research paper presentation is commonly used at conferences and other events where you have a chance to share the results of your research and receive feedback from colleagues. Creating a presentation on a research paper means refining your data, approach, and results to make them easy to grasp and share with others.

A PowerPoint presentation is one of the best tools for presenting information visually. In this article, you’ll learn how to make a research presentation in PowerPoint with a simple breakdown of steps and a detailed outline. We've developed a practical, step-by-step guide to help you prepare a stellar research presentation.

Before we dive in, here's a reminder that you don't have to be an expert to make one. If presentation design feels overwhelming or time is limited, consider professional PowerPoint redesign services. If you still wonder how to make slides for a research presentation, contact our carefully selected team at SlidePeak. Our experienced designers specialize in creating engaging layouts, incorporating compelling graphics, and ensuring a cohesive visual narrative that complements content on any subject. These presentation examples were submitted by our experts during the hiring process and published with their permission.

Visme can help you create all kinds of research, corporate and creative presentations. A research presentation is a visual representation of an individual's or organization's systematic investigation of a subject. It helps the presenter obtain feedback on their proposed research. The purpose of a research presentation is to share the findings with the world. When done well, it helps achieve significant levels of impact in front of groups of people.

How to prepare an Oral Research Presentation

Key Steps to Prepare a Research Presentation

A PPT presentation of a research paper takes several key steps to present your data and reach your audience effectively.

Step 1: Define the Purpose

Beginning the design process without deciding on the purpose of your presentation is like crawling in the dark without knowing the destination. The purpose of a research presentation can be defending a dissertation, an academic job interview, a conference, asking for funding, and various others.

Step 2: Know Your Audience

To do that, you need to establish who your audience is. You probably wouldn't speak to your lecturer like you talk to your friends. Your target audience might be a mix of all of the above. In that case, it's better to have something for everyone. The answers to these questions will help you know your audience better and prepare your research presentation accordingly.

Step 3: Create a Presentation Outline

Before crafting your presentation, it's crucial to create a presentation outline. Learn more about presentation structure to keep your audience engaged.

Step 4: Simplify Your Slides

One of the most important things people often overlook is the amount of text on their presentation slides. Since the audience will be listening and watching, putting up a slide with lots of words will make them focus on reading instead of listening. The simpler you make your slides, the more your audience will grasp the meaning and retain the critical information.

Step 5: Use Visuals

When adding facts and figures to your research presentation, harness the power of data visualization. Add charts and graphs to take out most of the text. Text with visuals causes a faster and stronger reaction than words alone, making your presentation more memorable. Have a look at these data visualization examples for inspiration.

Step 6: Practice and Refine

Rehearse and refine: Practice delivering your presentation within the time limit before the big day. Always review your presentation after you’ve completed the content and design to ensure a smooth and confident delivery. Even experienced speakers need to practice. Rehearse your presentation early to check if your ideas are clear and well-organized. Record yourself speaking and analyze the playback.

Essential Slides in a Research Presentation

The above outline is just a general guideline. Here are some slides that should be included in your presentation:

1. Your literature review has to provide context for your research by summing up relevant literature.
2. This slide of your research PowerPoint presentation has to explain the research design, methods, and procedures.
3. Use this slide to present your data analysis results and discuss important patterns, trends, or findings.
4. Your conclusion slide has to recap the main findings, their implications, and discuss the broader impact of your research.
5. A Q&A slide helps keep your audience engaged.

Tips for Designing Engaging Slides

You’ve probably been to a presentation where the presenter reads word for word from their PowerPoint outline. Or where the presentation is cluttered, chaotic, or contains too much data. You want to provide enough information to keep your audience engaged until the last slide.

Slide Design

The background of each presentation slide is a crucial design element for your presentation. So choose the background carefully. Use simple and relevant backgrounds to make the slide aesthetically appealing. Always use the same background for the slides throughout the presentation. Slide after slide of the same layout makes your presentation repetitive and boring.

Color and Font Choices

Colors play an essential role in designing your presentation slides, regardless of the type of presentation you're working with. However, if you're a non-designer, you might be unsure about about how to use colors in a presentation. Don't be discouraged if you still find it difficult to choose colors for your presentation.

Fonts are another design element that can make or break the design of your research presentation. If you struggle a lot while choosing fonts for a presentation, you aren't alone. Use different font sizes for headings and body text. Learn about font pairing and use it in your design. Use two or three fonts max-ideally two. One should be for the headlines and the other for the body text. Handwritten fonts and script fonts may look tempting, but they are a big no.

Visual Elements

Are there any images you can use in your research presentation slides to introduce or explain a topic? Pictures can also help you reduce the text clutter in the presentation, as long as they prompt you to make the points you need to make. Upload your own photos or browse through Visme's high-resolution stock photo library. If you can’t find the perfect image, don’t worry. Use Visme’s AI Image Generator to whip one up for you based on prompts.

Content Layout

PowerPoint slides have limited space, so use it carefully. Choose a clear, readable font and use it on every slide. Good options include Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri, or Open Sans. Use visuals (e.g., graphs) instead of tables and topic-relevant illustrations instead of walls of text. Keep visuals neat and professional. When using graphs or tables for complex data, keep them clear and easy to scan.

Here are some rules to keep in mind:

1. Without making your point clear immediately, you will struggle to keep your audience's attention. Too much text can make your slides look cluttered and overwhelm the audience. To avoid cognitive overload, combine text and images.
2. We recommend using one piece of information on a single slide. If you're talking about two or more topics, divide the topics into different slides to make your slides easily digestible and less daunting.
3. Use the slide headings of your presentation as a summary message. Think about the one key point you want the audience to take from each slide. And make the header short and impactful. For example, you may have a statistic you want to really get across to your audience. But what if that statistic changes? With Visme's Dynamic Fields feature, updating important information throughout your presentation is a breeze.
4. Visme's Presenter Studio comes with a presenter notes feature that can help you keep your slides succinct. Some people spend nearly all of the presentation going over the existing research and giving background information on the particular case. Since you're preparing a research presentation, use more slides to explain the research papers you directly contributed to. Your audience is there to learn about your new and exciting research, not to hear a summary of old work. Use Visme’s collaboration tools to work on your research presentation together with your team. Learn more about how to give a good presentation.

A study shows that 91% of presenters feel more confident when presenting a well-designed slide deck. Pro Tip: Short on time?

Have a look at the presentation template below.

Example: Oral Presentations by Penn State Graduate Students

The research presentations on this page are model talks given by graduate students. All presentations follow the assertion-evidence approach.

• Michelle Kehs, a PhD student in mechanical engineering from Penn State, gives a research talk on the optimized control of a buoyant wind turbine. Such turbines operate hundreds of meters in the atmosphere where the wind currents are stronger. Michelle studied in the laboratory of Professor Hosam Fathy.
• Jacob Snyder, a PhD student in mechanical engineering from Penn State, gives a research presentation about the effect of the build direction on tolerances of additively manufactured microchannels in a gas turbine engine.
• Marie Roald, a PhD student in computer science from Simula Research Laboratory, applies the assertion-evidence approach to a mathematical subject.
• Kathryn Kirsch, a PhD student in mechanical engineering from Penn State, discusses the application of additive manufacturing (AM) to blades in gas turbine engines. Kathryn worked for Professor Karen Thole in the Penn State START Laboratory. Kathryn recently won best paper awards at an IGTI Conference (Heat Transfer Division) and an AIAA Conference (Best Paper Overall).
• Shawn Siroka, a PhD student in mechanical engineering from Penn State, makes a pitch for the gas turbine facility named START: Steady Thermal Aero Research Turbine.

Table: Key Steps for Oral Presentation Preparation

Step	Description
Approval	Students must meet with their research mentor to obtain approval for this type of presentation, ensuring it aligns with their project.
Scheduling	There will be 4-5 scholars scheduled during each 50-minute presentation session. Each scholar is expected to give an 8-minute oral presentation accompanied by google slides.
Check-in	All presenters are expected to check in at the registration table when arriving at the Symposium. After checking in, head to the oral presentation room that you are scheduled for to check in with the Room Facilitator.
Room Setup	Each presentation room will have a Room Facilitator that will be responsible for introducing each scholar and facilitating Q & A. The presentation room will be set up lecture-style with a podium and projector. The podium will hold a laptop with your google slides uploaded and ready to go when you arrive.
Slide Submission	You will have from Monday, April 14 - Tuesday, April 22 to make any final edits or changes within the google drive folder. All access will be removed on Tuesday, April 22 at 12:00 Noon. Edits to the presentation slides will not be allowed past this date. Please note that all finalized presentations should be mentor approved. A combined google slide show for each presentation session will be created and used the day of the symposium.
Slide Creation	Oral presentations must be created in google slides for accessibility purposes.

Presentation Delivery Tips

Eye contact and gestures matter in presentations. When you look your audience in the eye, you feel more confident because you can tell if they actually understand your message. Many TED speakers begin with a personal story to grab the audience’s attention and make their narrative more relatable. Transitions are linking words or phrases that help make your presentation script more natural and ideas logically connected.

Introduce yourself by clearly stating your name, institute and research focus. For example: “I’m Jane Doe from XYZ University. As a general rule, you should spend 1-2 minutes on each slide.

For an effective presentation, conclusions are no less important than openings. Lastly, remember that even experienced presenters get nervous before delivering research paper PowerPoint presentations in front of the audience. You cannot know everything; some things can be beyond your control, which is completely fine. You are at the event not only to share what you know but also to learn from others.

Anticipate potential questions from your audience and prepare thoughtful responses. Focus on key points: Get to the meat of it quickly.

Good scientific research involves a sound methodology and a novel idea that can be tested simply and repeatedly to give valid, trustworthy results. However, even the most clinically significant research is useless if it is not communicated successfully. Scientific ideas are novel, sometimes simple in theory, but most always complex in technique. These attributes of research make it necessary to use all available means of presentation.

The most common media for scientists to communicate with the general public is primary journal articles. However, posters and oral presentations are also affective because they allow scientists to be in direct contact with their audience. A poster is an exciting way for scientists to present their research. It, just as a primary research article, includes all aspects of the scientific method. A title that is brief, but specific, an abstract, an introduction, material and methods, results, and a conclusion are some headings that can appear on a poster. Also, references and acknowledgments are sometimes are included.