Journal club: slides from a paper, each point with its passage

Preparing a journal club takes an evening: read the paper again, choose the figures, write the slides, guess the questions. The journal club (Premium+) writes the slides for your audience and the length of your talk, each point with the passage of the paper that supports it, the earlier work, where the paper stands and the hard questions to prepare. You then edit them, present them and export them.

This guide follows a real deck, written on 10 November 2026, on Huet, Kral & Manchon (2026), Water gas discs in exo-asteroid belts, a paper under a CC BY license: its full text and its figures could be used.

1. Choose a paper and your audience

Open the journal club and search for the paper, or open its summary page and choose the journal club in Tools for this paper.

The journal club page: choose a paper by its title, keywords, author or DOI. — Start from any paper.

Choose the language of the slides, the audience (researchers of the field, students new to the topic, researchers of another field) and the length of the talk (10, 20 or 45 minutes): they set the share of context, the level of detail and the number of slides. Each set of settings gives a deck of its own, and the others are kept. Ours, for researchers of the field and 20 minutes, took under a minute and has 15 slides.

The deck of Water gas discs in exo-asteroid belts, with the settings language, audience and length, and the toolbar: Edit slides, Save my version, Present full screen, Presenter view, PowerPoint, Overleaf Beamer, LaTeX Beamer and PDF. — The settings of the deck, and everything you can do with it.

2. Check each point against the paper

Each slide holds a few points, a figure of the paper when it helps, and the speaker notes. Under it, Sources says how many of its points were found in the paper: each one with its kind (result, method, interpretation, context), the passage of the paper, its section, and a link to open it in the paper.

The slide Physical model and parameter space with figure 1 of the paper and its credit, the speaker notes, and its sources: 4 of 4 points found in the paper, each with its passage and its section. — A slide with figure 1 of the paper, its notes, and the passage behind each point.

A point whose passage is not in the paper, or that gives a number the paper never states, is marked for you to check. In our deck, the slide comparing the paper with earlier research has 0 of its 3 points found in the paper: it is written from the earlier papers, not from this one, and says so.

The last slides are not left to the model alone:

Earlier work and what came next comes from the papers the paper cites and those that cite it, never from the model's memory;
Where the paper stands comes from Crossref and arXiv: here, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on 21 September 2026, with its DOI; a retraction, a correction or a newer arXiv version would be shown there;
Strengths and limits puts the limits the authors state, each with its passage, apart from the points to discuss, which are the model's own reading and say so.

The slide Strengths and limits: four strengths, and four limits stated by the authors, such as the one-dimensional treatment and planets not explicitly included. — The strengths, and the limits the authors state themselves.

The slide For the discussion: points to discuss, marked as an AI reading to check, and questions for the audience. — For the discussion: the points to discuss are an AI reading, marked as such.

3. Prepare the hard questions

Under the slides, The hard questions to prepare lists what the audience is likely to ask, with what the paper lets you answer. A passage is shown only when it really is in the paper; otherwise the answer says to check it before giving it. Ask the paper another question opens the chat on the paper.

The hard questions to prepare: does photodissociation eliminate the proposed delivery pathway? The answer, with the passage of section 2.3 Planetary accretion and a link to open it in the paper. — A hard question, and the passage of the paper that answers it.

4. Edit the slides

Click Edit slides. For each slide you can move it, duplicate it, add a slide after it or remove it; change its title, its points and its notes; choose the text size, another figure of the paper, its position and its size; and ask the model to rewrite it shorter, simpler, more technical, or to write its speaker notes. Save my version: your edits are private, and the deck everyone else gets stays as it was written.

The editor of a slide: move, duplicate, add a slide after, remove; the slide title, its text one bullet per line, its speaker notes; text size, figure, figure position and size; and Rewrite shorter, simpler, more technical or speaker notes. — The editor of a slide, with its rewrites.

Present full screen, or Presenter view: your notes, the next slide and a timer on your screen, the slides on the projector.
Download PowerPoint, Save as PDF (16:9), or LaTeX Beamer, as a .zip or as a new Overleaf project with the figures of the paper and your notes; see the Overleaf guide.
Share with the participants: a read-only link to your saved version, with the slides, the sources and the hard questions, for 90 days and without an account.

Present the papers your team proposes

A journal club often discusses several papers. In the tools of a paper page, in your daily paper alert or in a weekly letter, Propose for the journal club adds the paper to a collection your team shares: invite your colleagues to the collection so that everyone proposes papers, sorts them and leaves notes.

Propose for the journal club: add the paper to the collection Journal club or to a new collection, and invite colleagues to it. — Each colleague proposes papers in the shared collection.

The presenter then opens the collection and chooses Journal club of the selected papers (6 at most, in the order of the collection).

In a collection, Journal club of the selected papers: slides presenting them together, each paper in turn, then how they compare, with the button Prepare the slides. — The slides of the selected papers of a collection.

We made one with three papers on secondary gas in debris discs: the water gas discs, the planetary gaps in the gas (Bergez-Casalou & Kral 2024) and the predictions of CO, C and O (Kral et al. 2017). The deck presents each paper in turn, then how the papers compare: where they agree and where they differ, each point naming the paper it comes from.

The journal club of a collection: 3 selected papers, the toolbar, and the title slide Secondary gas in debris discs: water delivery, planetary gaps, and observable tracers, with the three papers. — Three papers of a collection in one deck.

The slide How the papers compare: where they agree (viscous transport, chemical survival and line emission) and where they differ (viscosity, LTE or non-LTE, distances tested). — How the three papers compare, each point naming its paper.

Limits

Under a license that lets us read only the abstract, the deck is short (3 or 4 slides) and says what the abstract does not tell.
Points without a passage, and the points to discuss, are the model's reading: check them before presenting.
LaTeX sets the text with other fonts than the page: a long slide is scaled down in Beamer, and Overleaf's log names those reduced by more than a tenth.

FAQ

Where do the points of the slides come from?

From the text of the paper that its license lets us read: the full text under an open license, otherwise the abstract only, and the deck is then short. Each point comes with the passage that supports it, kept only when the passage really is in the text; a point without one is marked for you to check.

Are the figures those of the paper?

Yes, from the paper's own HTML and only under an open license, each with its credit. In the editor you can choose another figure of the paper for each slide.

Can I present several papers?

Yes. From a collection, the slides present its selected papers together (6 at most, in its order): each paper in turn, then how they compare and questions for the discussion.

Which formats can I export?

PowerPoint (.pptx), PDF 16:9, and LaTeX Beamer, as a .zip or as a new Overleaf project; your edits go into every export.