How to properly cite other papers in my slides?
Well, in my field, it's certainly the habit to mention only the authors and the year, unless it's really old. So I would have
Theorem [Doe, Soe, 2010; Smith 1997] There is ...
The reasons are:
If someone needs the full citation, he has the proceedings / book of abstracts.
The only interesting things in the citation are:
- It's not your result, you borrow it from elsewhere
- Which people did it -- quite likely you have some of them in the auditorium, they can get upset if you don't credit them, and they'll be pleased if you point them out.
- How old is it -- is it something known for years, or is it a "hot result"?
If you publish the presentation online after the conference, it might be a good habit to add the whole bibliography of the proceedings as a last slide. It can be in a small font since it's only for people to read it on the computer.
The key of a talk is not to be precise, but to show the most relevant information!
As an applied mathematician, I like to go for the format [Author1, Author2 JST '99], where "JST" is an abbreviation for the journal. I truncate longer author lists with et al, and add initials in some cases to reduce ambiguity [Li RC, Guo CH, LAA '05]. With the help of a macro, I put the citations in square brackets (following the LaTeX usage), in a different color (dark grey) and font (\small
/\footnotesize
).
Of course every solution to this problem is a compromise between brevity, readability and googleability, but it seems to me that this one works well in my field.
My suggestion is probably not applicable to presentations using a lot of citations, or using them on a lot of pages (but then, I think a good presentation shouldn't cite too much, so it's okay).
In addition to using whichever citation style best works for you ( (Smith, 1995), [Smith et. al., CSJ, 2007]*, or even just [1] ), plus changing the text color sounds like a good idea, why don't you add the expanded citation in the slide footnote in a smaller font? If it's not more than 1-2 or maybe 3 cites per slide, on no more than a few slides, it could work nicely and even allow you to use the basic [1], [2,3] citation style.
Also it could be a good idea to include the list of most important citations on the last slide (maybe not showing it in the presentation, but useful for possible questions).
Something like this: :)
* Smith, Jones and Doe: "Very important article", Cool Science Journal, 2007
or:
[1] Jones and Smith: "Yet another important article", 2000