How to properly cite other papers in my slides?

Well, in my field, it's certainly the habit to mention only the authors and the year, unless it's really old. So I would have

Theorem [Doe, Soe, 2010; Smith 1997] There is ...

The reasons are:

• If someone needs the full citation, he has the proceedings / book of abstracts.

• The only interesting things in the citation are:

  1. It's not your result, you borrow it from elsewhere
  2. Which people did it -- quite likely you have some of them in the auditorium, they can get upset if you don't credit them, and they'll be pleased if you point them out.
  3. How old is it -- is it something known for years, or is it a "hot result"?

If you publish the presentation online after the conference, it might be a good habit to add the whole bibliography of the proceedings as a last slide. It can be in a small font since it's only for people to read it on the computer.

The key of a talk is not to be precise, but to show the most relevant information!

As an applied mathematician, I like to go for the format [Author1, Author2 JST '99], where "JST" is an abbreviation for the journal. I truncate longer author lists with et al, and add initials in some cases to reduce ambiguity [Li RC, Guo CH, LAA '05]. With the help of a macro, I put the citations in square brackets (following the LaTeX usage), in a different color (dark grey) and font (\small/\footnotesize).

Of course every solution to this problem is a compromise between brevity, readability and googleability, but it seems to me that this one works well in my field.

My suggestion is probably not applicable to presentations using a lot of citations, or using them on a lot of pages (but then, I think a good presentation shouldn't cite too much, so it's okay).

In addition to using whichever citation style best works for you ( (Smith, 1995), [Smith et. al., CSJ, 2007]*, or even just [1] ), plus changing the text color sounds like a good idea, why don't you add the expanded citation in the slide footnote in a smaller font? If it's not more than 1-2 or maybe 3 cites per slide, on no more than a few slides, it could work nicely and even allow you to use the basic [1], [2,3] citation style.

Also it could be a good idea to include the list of most important citations on the last slide (maybe not showing it in the presentation, but useful for possible questions).

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<sub><sup>Something like this: :)
* Smith, Jones and Doe: "Very important article", Cool Science Journal, 2007
or:
[1] Jones and Smith: "Yet another important article", 2000</sup></sub>