How to make journal club slidesThe 8-slide structure — and why pasting AI summaries is risky

First, get clear on what the slides are for.

Journal club slides aren't a bulletin board for posting a digest of the paper. They're a route map that walks the audience through: why this paper, what was done, what was found, what's questionable, and what we make of it.

That framing simplifies every judgment call. Does this slide move the audience toward the next one? If not — even if it's accurate — cut it.

The basic route uses eight slides.

Slide 1: why this paper — the clinical or research question and your reason for choosing it. Slide 2: the PICO or research question — who, what intervention, compared with what, measured how.

Slide 3: study design and participants — RCT or observational, plus the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Slide 4: the intervention, exposure, and comparison — concretely, what was done.

Slide 5: the primary outcome — what counted as "it worked." Slide 6: the main results, built around the key figures. Slide 7: limitations and bias. Slide 8: points for discussion.

Lay out just these eight headings first, then fill them in — and you'll find you can no longer stall halfway.

In the first half, keep one obvious fact in mind: your audience hasn't read the paper.

For slide 1 — why this paper — write in your own words, without embarrassment. "I saw a case last month and wondered about the rationale for this treatment." One sentence like that changes how people listen.

Present the PICO as a table that fits on one screen. If it's fuzzy, every later slide feels aimless; if it's crisp, you can trim details elsewhere and the talk still holds together.

Two common mistakes happen on slide 6, the results.

The first is writing the results as text. The paper's main figures — Kaplan-Meier curves, forest plots, bar charts, tables — should carry the slide, with text only in support.

The second, and more dangerous: copying numbers from an AI summary onto your slides. Effect sizes, confidence intervals, p-values, event counts — take every one of them yourself from the text and figures of the original PDF.

AI can round or misread numbers. Numerical errors on slides are the mistake most often caught at journal club.

Honestly, anyone who prepares can produce the first six slides. The difference shows in slides 7 and 8.

The limitations slide levels up when you add one weakness you noticed yourself, beyond what the authors admit. Is the study population like your own patients? Is the follow-up long enough? How high was the dropout?

For slide 8, bring two or three questions along the lines of "Given these results, what should we do here?" A journal club is both a study session and a discussion — a presenter who arrives with questions raises the level of the whole meeting.

You might be thinking: the AI already wrote a summary — why not paste it in? Understandable, but I'd advise against it.

Three reasons. First, the number-reliability problem above. Second, an AI summary is text to be read, not text to be glanced at — paste long paragraphs onto a slide and your audience reads instead of listening.

Third, and most important: the moment you paste, you skip the step where the presenter explains it in their own words.

Breaking a summary into bullets and rephrasing it for slides feels like drudgery, but it is the substance of presentation prep. Use the AI summary as a draft; choose the words on the slide yourself. That line is worth holding.

Paperfy helps this prep in three ways.

Reviewing the figures. The figures and tables from your uploaded PDF are easy to browse, which speeds up choosing the main figure for slide 6. Confirm the final numbers on the corresponding page of the original, of course.

Editing the summary. AI summaries are hand-editable. Keep the reworded phrasing you used on your slides in the summary, and your own-words digest stays in your library after the talk.

Rehearsing by ear. Edit the radio script to follow your presentation flow, regenerate the audio, and rehearse on your commute. Being able to deliver the content without looking at the slides is more reassuring than you'd expect.

To recap how to build journal club slides:

Slides are a route map, not a summary. Lay out the eight headings first, then fill them in. Take the numbers and figures from the original PDF, not the AI summary. Add one limitation of your own. Never paste the summary — rephrase it in your own words.

Once the route is set, slide-making turns from an anxious blank page into filling in blanks. Next time you're assigned, start by laying out eight headings.