How to Cite Lecture Slides in APA: Access Comes First
To cite lecture slides in APA, first ask whether your intended reader can retrieve them. Public slides and slides your audience can open get reference entries. Material readers can't retrieve is cited as a personal communication. If a slide points to another source, find and read that source before citing it directly.
By plagiarism-checker-online.net Editorial Team | Published October 9, 2026
Most students know where the slides live: a Canvas module, a Blackboard folder, a shared drive. The harder question is what that location means for your reference list. APA doesn't sort slides by file type. It sorts them by whether the people reading your paper can get to them. This guide walks through that one decision, then through the metadata, the slide-level locator and the common trap of citing a study you only met on a slide.
Everything here follows APA 7 and the pages we cite. Check your instructor's syllabus too, because some courses state their own preferences for course materials.
Access ruleDecide who can access the slides
The APA Style page on PowerPoint slide and lecture note references gives two reference formats and one fallback. Slides available online to anyone get the hosting site's name and the URL. Slides from a classroom website, learning management system or company intranet get the site name and URL, using the login page URL when a login is required, if you're writing for an audience with access. If your audience can't get to the slides, you cite them as a personal communication.
Public readers
If the deck is posted where anyone can open it, such as a public course page or a slide-hosting site, cite it with the host site as the source. Your reader can click the link and see what you saw.
Your class audience
For a paper written for the same course, the instructor and classmates can open the course site. APA treats that as access. The reference names the platform and gives the login page URL, which is what APA asks for when a site requires a login.
Readers outside the course
The same Canvas deck becomes inaccessible if you submit the work to a journal, post it on a public blog or present it to people with no course login. For that audience the slides are not retrievable, so APA's fallback applies. Our table puts all four situations side by side.
| Situation | Can your reader retrieve it? | What to write | Reference list? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deck posted on an open course page or slide-hosting site | Yes, anyone can open it | Reference with the host site name and URL | Yes |
| Deck on Canvas or Blackboard, paper written for that course | Yes, your audience has access | Reference with the platform name and login page URL | Yes |
| Same deck, paper written for readers outside the course | No | Personal communication in the text | No |
| Slides shown in class but never shared, or a lecture with nothing recorded | No | Personal communication, or better, the research behind the lecture | No |
The last row follows APA's rule that works readers cannot recover are cited in the text only. It also reflects the APA personal communications page, which says a personal communication citation should be used only when no recoverable source exists. If you learned a topic in a lecture, it prefers that you cite the research the instructor drew on. Use the lecture itself only for original content not published elsewhere.
MetadataCollect author, date, title, format and location
Before you format anything, fill in the worksheet below from the slides and the course page. Missing pieces are normal. The fix is rarely a guess.
| Element | Where to look | If it's missing |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Title slide, slide footers, syllabus (instructor of record) | Ask the instructor. Don't substitute the course name. |
| Date | Title slide, last slide, file properties, the date the course page shows | Write n.d. in the date position. |
| Title | Title slide, not the file name | Check the course page heading, then ask. |
| Format description | The file itself | APA's examples use [PowerPoint slides] for a slide deck. |
| Location | Platform name plus the page where readers can find it | If your audience can't reach it, switch to personal communication. |
| Audience | Who will actually read this paper | Decide before choosing a format. Revisit if the audience changes. |
The n.d. rule comes from APA's page on missing reference information. Our Citation Generator has no slide-deck source type, so build this entry by hand from the worksheet and APA's examples, not from a form that promises it.
Worked casesThree worked cases with the same teaching material
Fictional teaching material: a deck titled “Memory and attention: Week 4 lecture” by a fictional instructor, Maren Lindqvist, for a fictional psychology course. The names, dates and URLs are invented. The reference strings below were produced from that metadata with the same pinned citation engine and APA style file the Citation Generator uses. Compare them with APA's own Jones and Mack and Spake examples on the page above.
Public slides
Imagine the deck sits on an open course page that anyone can reach.
Reference: Lindqvist, M. (2026, September 22). Memory and attention: Week 4 lecture [PowerPoint slides]. Open Course Slides. https://courses.example.org/psy210/week-4-slides
In text: (Lindqvist, 2026) or Lindqvist (2026).
Course-access slides
Now the identical deck is only on Canvas, and you're writing for that course. Use the platform name and the login page, as in APA's classroom-website example.
Reference: Lindqvist, M. (2026). Memory and attention: Week 4 lecture [PowerPoint slides]. Canvas. https://canvas.example.org/login
In text: (Lindqvist, 2026) or Lindqvist (2026).
Inaccessible lecture information
Last, suppose the professor made a point during the talk that appears on no slide, or the audience for your paper can't open the course site. Give the person's initial and surname and as exact a date as you can. Nothing goes in the reference list.
In text: (M. Lindqvist, personal communication, September 22, 2026) or M. Lindqvist (personal communication, September 22, 2026).
That format follows APA's personal communication examples. If the point rests on published research, cite the research instead. The same logic covers an emailed explanation, which our guide to citing a professor's email handles in detail.
LocatorsQuote a particular slide without losing its locator
APA asks for a page number when you quote directly, and for another way to find the quotation when the work has no page numbers. A slide number gives readers that path. We suggest this form:
Parenthetical: (Lindqvist, 2026, slide 7)
Narrative: Lindqvist (2026) described the limit as “about four chunks” (slide 7).
The quotation in that example is invented. The APA pages we read for this guide don't prescribe the exact label for a slide, so treat “slide 7” as clear and consistent rather than as an official format, and follow your instructor if they specify another one. Remember too that APA prefers paraphrase to quotation in most writing. Bullet fragments from a slide rarely read well inside a sentence.
Original sourcesWhen the slide cites a study
Slides often carry a name and year, like a working-memory model credited to a pair of researchers. That small label is a lead, not a source you've read.
Retrieve the original
APA's slide page says that when slides cite information published elsewhere and you want to cite it too, it's best to find, read and cite the original source yourself rather than citing the slides as a secondary source. Use the slide to find the study. Open the study, check what it actually says, and cite it directly. Cite the slides separately only for what comes from the instructor, such as their synthesis or a classroom example.
If it cannot be read, use the existing secondary-citation guide
Sometimes the original is behind a paywall or out of print. Then you have choices that don't involve pretending you read it. Our guide to citing a source you have not read sets out those options, including when a secondary citation is honest and when you should drop the claim.
RevisionChange the reference when the audience changes
Suppose you wrote a course paper and now want to adapt it for a student journal whose readers have no course login. The citation has to change, and not only the format.
| Version | Sentence in the paper | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| Course paper | Short-term storage appears limited to a few items at once. | (Lindqvist, 2026) with a Canvas reference entry |
| Journal adaptation, outside readers | Short-term storage appears limited to a few items at once, as the underlying studies report. | The cited studies themselves. Use (M. Lindqvist, personal communication, September 22, 2026) only for content found nowhere else. |
The revision does two things. It removes a link readers can't open, and it points to sources they can check. That's better scholarship as well as better formatting. When you're unsure how an outside audience will see the work, ask your instructor or the journal before you decide.
ChecklistA pre-submission access and metadata checklist
- Name the audience for this version of the paper.
- Test the link as that audience would, from a logged-out browser if the slides are public.
- Fill in author, date, title, format and location from the worksheet. Use n.d. only after looking for a date.
- Choose a reference entry or a personal communication according to the access table.
- Add a slide locator to every direct quotation.
- For any study named on a slide, find and read the original, then cite it.
- Keep personal communications out of the reference list.
- Reread your instructor's syllabus for course-specific rules.
After the citations are right, you may want a final text comparison of the whole paper. Public slides can turn up in a web-source check, but PlagAware can't reach material behind a course login, and no scan confirms that an APA entry is correct. If it's useful, the plagiarism checker compares your text with public sources. For a wider look at the style, our guide to citing properly covers APA, MLA and Chicago, and the citation and referencing guide shows how the pieces fit together.
QuestionsFAQ
No. APA says slides from a learning management system such as Canvas or Blackboard get a reference entry, with the site name and its login page URL, when your audience has access to that site. If your audience doesn't have access, cite them as a personal communication.
Sometimes. Public slides, and course slides your audience can access, get reference list entries. Material your readers can't retrieve is cited in the text as a personal communication and doesn't appear in the reference list.
Add a locator to the usual citation, such as (Lindqvist, 2026, slide 7). APA says to give readers another way to find a quotation when a work has no page numbers. The APA pages we read don't prescribe a slide label, so check your instructor's preference.
If you use the study's findings, find, read and cite the original study. Cite the slides when you rely on the instructor's own explanation or synthesis. APA says citing the original source is better than citing the slides as a secondary source.
Look for a date on the title slide, the last slide, the file properties and the course page first. If none can be found, write n.d. in the date position, as in Lindqvist (n.d.), following APA's guidance on missing reference information.