research-presentation

Research Presentation

Turn a paper or research corpus into a presentation that an audience can follow, verify, and discuss. The core promise is paper to slides without losing the evidence: preserve source meaning, choose a cumulative narrative, make figures legible, keep claims bounded, and deliver an editable deck with notes and a rendered QA trail.

This Skill owns the workflow from source inspection through final slide QA. It does not replace the author's scientific judgment, invent results, or silently strengthen a claim.

Route the request

Choose the narrowest route that satisfies the request:

Input / request	Route
One or more PDFs, papers, or manuscripts	Full paper-to-slides workflow below; read references/paper-extraction.md first
Research notes, tables, figures, or a protocol	Evidence-led presentation workflow; mark unsupported fields instead of filling them
Existing PPTX to revise	Inspect the source deck, preserve its visual contract when requested, then run the same render/QA loop
A presentation brief with no source document	Skip extraction, but still create a claim ledger, narrative outline, source/asset notes, and visual QA
“Make it prettier” or “change the style”	Diagnose the current deck before editing; preserve scientific content and citations

Before building, infer one sentence:

By the end, [audience] should [understand/decide/discuss] because [central evidence-backed takeaway].

Ask at most one blocking question when a missing choice would change the deck materially (for example, defense versus journal club). Otherwise make a conservative assumption and state it in the run log.

Non-negotiable contracts

1. Evidence first. Read the source before planning the slide sequence. Never use a figure, number, table cell, citation, mechanism, or limitation that is not traceable to the supplied source or an explicitly cited external source.
2. Bounded claims. Preserve population, setting, time frame, comparison, uncertainty, and claim strength. Distinguish author conclusions from presenter interpretation and label the latter.
3. One narrative job per slide. Use takeaway titles that answer the question raised by the previous slide; do not build an inventory of paper sections.
4. One visual anchor per content slide. Use a readable original figure/table, a meaningful metric, or a simple source-faithful diagram. Avoid decorative diagrams and generic stock imagery.
5. Readable before complete. Start body text at 12 pt (11 pt floor), titles at 28–32 pt, cover title at 40–56 pt, and keep sub-11-pt characters below 10% of the deck. Add a slide or cut copy instead of shrinking type.
6. Source anchors everywhere. Every content slide carries a visible anchor such as Fig. 2, Table 1, §3.2, or p. 7; speaker notes include a [Sources] block for claims and assets.
7. No silent raster-only handoff. Prefer native/editable text, tables, shapes, and charts. Use source figures as images when needed, but preserve their aspect ratio and provide the original asset or source map.
8. Render before delivery. Render every final slide, inspect the full-size pages, run overflow/coverage/font checks, and fix unintended overlap, clipping, wrapping, stretched figures, and empty placeholders.