How to Cite a PowerPoint, Lecture or Class Notes in Turabian
Cite lectures, PowerPoint slides and class notes in Turabian. The rule depends on whether your reader can retrieve the source. Templates and examples.
Whether a lecture, a set of PowerPoint slides or your own class notes takes a full citation with a bibliography entry, or only a note, depends on one question: can your reader get to it? Publicly posted slides behave like website content. Material locked inside a course login, or notes you typed yourself, behave like personal communications and stay in the notes.
A lecture you attended:
- Gregory R. Crane, “Contextualizing Early Modern Religion in a Digital World” (lecture, Newberry Library, Chicago, September 16, 2011).
Publicly posted slides:
- Helen Osei, “The Corn Laws and the Politics of Bread” (PowerPoint presentation, HIST 212, Northgate University, October 4, 2025), https://courses.example.edu/hist212/slides/corn-laws.pdf.
Slides behind a course login:
- Helen Osei, “The Corn Laws and the Politics of Bread” (PowerPoint slides, HIST 212, Northgate University, October 4, 2025), course learning management system.
Your own class notes:
- Notes taken in HIST 212, Northgate University, lecture by Helen Osei, October 4, 2025.
Examples use illustrative details except where a real work is named.
Below: the retrievability test in full, the template for each classroom source type, what changes in the author-date system, and why citing the lecturer’s source is usually the stronger move.
The retrievability test
Turabian’s underlying logic across all source types is that a citation is a set of directions. If the directions lead somewhere your reader can go, the source earns a bibliography entry. If they do not, it stays in a note where you can explain the circumstances.
| Classroom source | Can a reader retrieve it? | Note | Bibliography |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slides on a public course page | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Slides in a repository or on SlideShare | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Recorded lecture on a public platform | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Slides in a password-protected LMS | Not by outsiders | Yes | Usually not |
| Lecture attended in person, no recording | No | Yes | No |
| Printed handout | No | Yes | No |
| Your own notes | No | Yes | No |
| A conference paper later published | Yes, the published version | Yes | Yes |
Two qualifications. Departments sometimes want everything listed, including LMS material, so that a marker can see the full range of what a student used; follow that instruction where it exists. And “retrievable” means retrievable by a reader outside your institution, not merely by your classmates.
Lectures and talks
Turabian’s pattern for a lecture gives the speaker, the title in quotation marks, and then a parenthesis containing the type of presentation, the place and the date.
Template:
Speaker, “Title of Lecture” (type of presentation, venue, city, date).
A public lecture:
- Gregory R. Crane, “Contextualizing Early Modern Religion in a Digital World” (lecture, Newberry Library, Chicago, September 16, 2011).
A class lecture:
- Helen Osei, “The Corn Laws and the Politics of Bread” (lecture, HIST 212, Northgate University, October 4, 2025).
A conference paper:
- Marcus Bell, “Cataloguing Practice in Regional Archives” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Archivists, Leeds, July 8, 2025).
A keynote or a named lecture:
- Priya Raman, “Objects Without Owners” (keynote address, Material Culture Colloquium, Northgate University, February 20, 2026).
Shortened note:
- Crane, “Contextualizing Early Modern Religion.”
Bibliography entry, when the talk is retrievable:
Bell, Marcus. “Cataloguing Practice in Regional Archives.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Archivists, Leeds, July 8, 2025.
Notice the transformation from note to bibliography: the parentheses disappear, the elements become sentence units separated by periods, and the descriptor is capitalized where it begins a new element. That is the same shift described in our bibliography format guide.
PowerPoint and other slide decks
Slides are cited like a lecture, with the format named in place of the presentation type.
Template:
Presenter, “Title of Presentation” (PowerPoint presentation, course or event, institution, date), URL or location.
Posted publicly:
- Helen Osei, “The Corn Laws and the Politics of Bread” (PowerPoint presentation, HIST 212, Northgate University, October 4, 2025), https://courses.example.edu/hist212/slides/corn-laws.pdf.
Bibliography entry:
Osei, Helen. “The Corn Laws and the Politics of Bread.” PowerPoint presentation, HIST 212, Northgate University, October 4, 2025. https://courses.example.edu/hist212/slides/corn-laws.pdf.
Citing a specific slide. Slides are numbered, and that number does the work a page number does:
- Osei, “Corn Laws,” slide 14.
Slides for a talk you attended, where the deck is not available. Cite the talk rather than the file, and mention the slide in your text if the visual content is the point.
Slides by an organization rather than a person. The organization takes the author position:
- Northgate University Library, “Finding Primary Sources” (PowerPoint presentation, orientation week, September 2, 2025), https://library.example.edu/orientation.pdf.
Class notes and handouts
Your own notes are a record of what you heard, filtered through your attention and your handwriting. They are not a source anyone else can check, which is why they behave like personal communications.
Cite them in a note:
- Notes taken in HIST 212, Northgate University, lecture by Helen Osei, October 4, 2025.
A printed handout:
- Helen Osei, “Timeline of the Repeal Debate” (handout, HIST 212, Northgate University, October 4, 2025).
Someone else’s notes. If you used a classmate’s notes, say so, and treat them as a personal communication:
- Dana Whitfield, class notes for HIST 212, shared with the author, October 6, 2025.
None of these appear in the bibliography.
The better move: cite what the lecturer cited
A lecture is a route to a fact, not the origin of it. If your instructor said in class that grain prices doubled between 1845 and 1847, the number came from somewhere, and that somewhere is the citation your reader wants.
Look for it in three places: the slide’s footer, the reading list, and the lecturer directly. Asking after class is normal and takes thirty seconds.
Cite the lecture itself when the lecturer’s own contribution is what you are using: an original argument, unpublished research, a framing you are responding to, or an interpretation you are disputing. In those cases the lecture is the source, and citing it is correct rather than a shortcut.
Learning management systems
Material inside Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle or a similar system is visible only to enrolled students, so a URL from your browser will not work for anyone else. Two workable approaches:
Name the system in place of a URL:
- Helen Osei, “The Corn Laws and the Politics of Bread” (PowerPoint slides, HIST 212, Northgate University, October 4, 2025), Canvas course site.
Or describe the access in your text and keep the note simple. Either is defensible; what is not defensible is pasting a link that returns a login screen.
Recorded lectures inside an LMS follow the same logic. A recording on a public platform is a video and can be cited as one, with a timestamp for the moment you are using; see our YouTube citation guide for that pattern.
Author-date treatment
The year moves to the front and the parentheses around the descriptive elements drop away.
In-text citation:
(Osei 2025)
(Osei 2025, slide 14)
Reference list entry, for retrievable slides:
Osei, Helen. 2025. “The Corn Laws and the Politics of Bread.” PowerPoint presentation, HIST 212, Northgate University, October 4, 2025. https://courses.example.edu/hist212/slides/corn-laws.pdf.
Non-retrievable material stays in the text as a personal communication and gets no reference list entry:
(notes taken in HIST 212, October 4, 2025)
The general rules for parentheticals and reference lists are in our Turabian author-date guide.
Recorded lectures, captions and transcripts
Recorded teaching is now routine, and it raises the same questions as any audiovisual source.
A recording on a public platform is cited as a video, with a timestamp for the passage you use:
- Helen Osei, “The Corn Laws and the Politics of Bread,” lecture, YouTube video, 51:20, posted by Northgate University, October 4, 2025, at 22:40, https://youtu.be/example.
A recording inside a course system is cited like other LMS material, naming the system rather than pasting a link, with the timestamp still doing the work of a page number:
- Helen Osei, “The Corn Laws and the Politics of Bread,” lecture recording, HIST 212, Northgate University, October 4, 2025, at 22:40, course learning management system.
Automatic captions are not a transcript. Caption tracks mishear names, technical vocabulary and anything said quickly, which is exactly the material you are most likely to want to quote. Listen to the passage before you put it in quotation marks. Where a checked transcript exists, quote from that and say you have done so.
A transcript published alongside the lecture is cited as a transcript, with its own URL where it has one.
Coursepacks, readings and slides you made yourself
A reading in a coursepack is not a coursepack citation. Almost every item in a coursepack is a chapter or an article that was published somewhere first, and that original publication is what you cite. The first page of the extract usually carries the original source details; if it does not, the syllabus will.
A reading list entry is not a source either. It is a pointer. Find the item and cite it.
Slides you made yourself for a presentation are not cited in your own written work. If you are submitting the slides as part of an assessment, the sources on them are cited on the slides, usually in a footer credit or on a final references slide, using the same Turabian forms as a paper.
Material a classmate produced is a personal communication unless it was published somewhere your reader can reach.
The general principle behind all four: a citation should point at where the content was published, not at the folder you found it in.
Interviews and conversations with an instructor
A question answered in office hours is a personal communication, cited in a note and left out of the bibliography:
- Helen Osei, conversation with the author, October 8, 2025.
If the exchange was substantial enough to count as an interview, the fuller conventions in our interview citation guide apply, including when permission to quote is expected.
How markers read classroom citations
It is worth knowing what a citation to a lecture signals, because the signal is not neutral.
A paper that cites the course lectures repeatedly reads as a paper built from the course rather than from research. That is fine for a reflective assignment and a problem for a research essay, where the point of the exercise is to go beyond what you were told. If half your notes point at your own classroom, the reading has not been done.
A single lecture citation for the lecturer’s own argument reads well. It shows you were listening, that you noticed an interpretation that is not in the published literature, and that you knew it needed crediting.
A lecture citation for a fact with an obvious published source reads as a shortcut, and it is the one your marker is most likely to be the person who said it. They will know where the number came from and will notice that you did not look.
No citation at all for material that came from class is the actual error. Students sometimes omit a lecture citation because it feels awkward, or because they assume the instructor knows they said it. Unattributed use of someone’s argument is unattributed use regardless of how you encountered it.
There is a practical version of all this. Before citing a lecture, ask yourself what the citation is for. If the answer is “because that is where I heard it,” go and find where it came from. If the answer is “because this is the lecturer’s own reading of the evidence,” cite the lecture and say so in your sentence, which makes the value of the citation visible: “as Osei argued in the October lecture.”
Common mistakes
Italicizing the presentation title. Quotation marks.
Pasting an LMS link. It leads to a login page for everyone but you.
Listing personal notes in the bibliography. They are not retrievable.
Citing the lecture for a fact that has a published source. Find the source.
Omitting the date. A course runs the same lecture every year; the date identifies the one you heard.
Citing “PowerPoint” as though it were the publisher. It is the format.
Treating a slide’s bullet point as a quotation from the lecturer. Slides compress. If you are quoting words, be sure they were the words used.
Frequently asked questions
Do class lecture slides go in the bibliography? Only if a reader can retrieve them. Publicly posted slides do; slides inside a course login usually do not.
How do I cite my own class notes? In a note, naming the lecturer, the course and the date. Better still, cite the source the lecturer was using.
Is a PowerPoint title italicized? No. A single presentation takes quotation marks.
How do I cite a guest lecture or a conference paper? With the same template as a lecture: speaker, title in quotation marks, then the type of presentation, the venue and the date in parentheses.
Should I cite the lecture or the source the lecturer used? Cite the original source whenever you can find it. Cite the lecture when the lecturer’s own argument or unpublished research is what you are using.
The short version
Ask whether your reader can reach the source. If yes, cite it fully and list it. If no, cite it in a note, describe how you encountered it, and keep it out of the bibliography. And when the lecture was pointing at something else, go and get that instead.
For the published sources on your reading list, the Turabian Citation Generator will build the notes and bibliography entries once you have the author, title, publisher and date.