Although a presentation is, due to its purpose (visual support of a speech), not the ideal source of information for a scholarly text, you still may need to cite this type of the document (e.g. in fields concerned with communication). When citing a presentation, you need to distinguish the way in which it is accessible. The models for a bibliographic reference to a presentation differ based on whether it is an unpublished presentation, a presentation displayed as a file to be downloaded on a webpage or directly inserted into the webpage. Let us show you the differences in their manner of citation using the following examples.
Suppose that on 5 March 2014, we participated in a presentation on citing. After it ended, we asked the lecturer for his presentation and he gave us a copy (e.g. he copied it to our flash drive). Now we are about to write a text on citing in which we want to use some of the information from the presentation, therefore we must create a bibliographic reference to the presentation.
First, look at the instructions of the citation style to see if it contains a description of how a bibliographic reference to a presentation should look. If there is such description in the citation style, then we follow it and proceed similarly as in the previous document, i.e. we compile the bibliographic reference piece by piece.
In our case we are citing according to the NLM style, which does not contain a model for citing a presentation. In this situation, you should follow the model of a bibliographic reference for a document whose character is the closest to a presentation. Due to the fact that presentations are usually a part of a performance in front of a professional public, it makes sense to create the bibliographic reference according to the model for poster from a conference. In this case we were successful and found a model of the appropriate bibliographic reference for this type of the document. We then compiled the reference according to the model analogically modifying the details typical of a poster to details that reference to a presentation should contain. That means that instead of the information about the conference we provided information about the lecture (name of the library activity in which scope the lecture was held, date and venue), all of which is introduced by a phrase expressing that this is not a poster but a presentation.
Kratochvíl J. University Campus Library experience. Presentation presented at: [University of Saskatchewan; 2019 Apr 25; Saskatoon, Canada.]
Information about the name of the university, date and venue are in square brackets, because they were not stated directly in the presentation, but rather found in another source (from the author).
The second model situation is similar to the preceding one with the difference that this time, we cite a presentation that is available to everyone on the internet, e.g. presentations on the website of the conference. In this case it is necessary to search for the citation model for such presentation according to the citation style. In our case, the NLM citation style considers a presentation published in this way to not be a document from a conference, but rather to be an individual title available on a website. Therefore a bibliographic reference to an online book is used as a model. When creating the bibliographic reference we took the details primarily from the presentation itself and we only used the website to copy the URL of the presentation by right-clicking on Copy the address of the link.
Nguyen K. Mastering Education [Internet]. [Sydney]: The University of Sydney; [2018] [cited 2019 Jan 24]. 22 p. Available from: http://www.phemc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/SSEM18-Khanh-Nguyen-Mastering-Education.pdf
We inserted place and year of publication of the event into square brackets, because they are not given directly in the presentation, but we can deduce it from the year of the event and the name of the university.
In the third model situation, the presentation is an integral part of a webpage, or more precisely it is one of its elements. In this case it is always necessary to read the citation style carefully to determine how to proceed when citing. However, you commonly encounter instructions that you should create a bibliographic reference to a contribution on a webpage although it is a presentation. It is no different with the NLM style that we are using as our basis for creating samples of bibliographic references in this manual. This style differentiates specifically between whether the document is separated from the remaining webpage (see the model situation 2) or whether it is an integral part of it (in this case you should create a bibliographic reference to a contribution on a webpage.
SlideShare [Internet]. San Francisco, CA: LinkedIn Corporation; c2014. Integrating Modalities of the East into Western Life and Medical Practice; 2013 Jun 29 [cited 2014 Jul 7]; 13 pp. Avai- lable from: http://www.slideshare.net/oshaugs/the-icpd-wo- mens-roles-and-reproductive-rights
The author of the presentation is not given, because the NLM style instructs us that when citing a part of a webpage, this detail should not be specified. Although we found the place of publication on a different webpage, it is not in square brackets, because we found this piece of information in the same domain of SlideShare.Although on finds the copyright date 1996 on the introductory slide of the presentation, we entered the date of publication of the cited part according to the model for the bibliographic reference.Despite the NLM instruction that the exact page number of a contribution should be introduced by the abbreviation of the word page (e.g. pp. 5–9), we provided the information on the total number of pages of the presentation, i.e. 13 pp. We did that for the logical reason that the cited presentation in relation to the other information on the webpage is not an excerpt of the webpage but an inserted complete work. If the inserted object contained multiple presentations (connected into one file) and we were to cite one of them, then we would of course provide the specific extent of pages introduced by the abbreviation for the word page.