Presenting research in a slideshow will help you in many ways. Not only will you be able to share your hard work with others and get valuable feedback - but the communication skills you will develop will serve you well throughout your future career.
Before diving into your slideshow - ask yourself - who is your audience? Research presentations can be for many audiences, such as:
Competition judges
Student peers
Professional researchers
All of the above and/or any other person!
Ask yourself - what would your audience benefit from knowing about your work? What parts should you explain in more detail and what parts less? Which main points do you want the audience to remember from your presentation?
Forming your slideshow based on the audience is crucial for having a successful presentation. For example:
If your audience is more experienced and knows your problem area very well - it may be enough to just state your problem and focus more on your solution
If your audience is more general, you may need to explain why your problem is important, or define key terms and background
Research presentations can vary from being 5 mins, 10 mins, 20 mins, or anything in between. Take the amount of time into account when you are planning your slideshow. It is best to spend about 30sec to 1 minute per slide (except for the title), so plan your slides accordingly. If you feel a topic is worth discussing for over 1 minute, you can always split up the material over multiple slides.
Form your outline. Here are the key elements. If your presentation is 5 minutes or less, you may need to skip some slides.
The problem
Your approach (and your hypothesis)
Your assumptions
Your experiments
What you learned
Open questions
Future work
Thank You / Q&A
If time permits, other elements to consider including:
You are using some technology or approach that the audience are not experts in - take some time to explain it and possibly show other examples where this technology is being used
Some research presentations expect you to explain how you are different from other work in the area. If this is not a priority for your audience - spend your time in the other topics
The amount of time you spend on a part of your research does not necessarily match the amount of time it should take in your presentation. For example - if you spent half of your project just trying to get one piece of code to work - that does not mean it takes up half of your presentation! You may want to mention what the challenge was - so that others can learn from your experiences
Focus on key takeaways. If there are three things that someone should learn from your project, what would they be? Add those to your conclusion and reinforce them in your slides.
Motivate the problem with numbers, charts, and other statistics
Have a flow diagram to explain your methodology
When you present your results - relate them to the flow diagram
Use clear and appropriate graphics for your results
Put the key takeaway of every slide on the slide itself. Try to have one slide for every major point that you would like to make.
More slides is sometimes better than a very dense slide that is hard to understand. As long as your time budget is met - more slides is okay
Remember that people may read your slides offline. Make sure there is enough information on each slide for the key messages to get through even if your audience views the slides offline
A simple outline for a conference presentation is attached below. Add as many slides as you need for results (or even approach). However, make sure that you have only as many slides as your time limit allows (assume at least one minute per slide). If your presentation is 5 minutes or less, focus on problem, approach, and a quick summary of key learnings.
Slide 1 - Title slide
Presentation title
Your name and the name of your collaborators
Organizations
Slide 2- The problem
Explain the problem and why it matters
Use statistics
Slide 3 - Your approach
What is the key idea?
Why is this new or different?
What is your hypothesis?
Slide 4 - Your evaluation
How did you evaluate your idea?
What was your experimental methodology?
Slide 5 (or more) - Results
What were the results of your experiments?
Slide 6. Discussion
What did you learn? This is where you should loop back on your hypothesis and state whether it was proven or disproven
Slide 7 (Optional - depends on conference) Related Work
What have others done?
What insights has your work added to the collective body of knowledge in the field?
Slide 8 - Conclusions and Future Work
What are your conclusions?
What would you like to do next?
Slide 9 - Acknowledgements
Thanks for anyone who is not a co-author but helped you in some way. This can include funding agencies, people who provided feedback etc.