The process of socialisation into the academic discourse community involves acquiring mastery of its established genres. While written academic genres have been intensively studied, spoken genres are relatively under‐researched. This study focuses on one such spoken research genre, the scientific conference presentation (CP) in English, and specifically on the introduction section, a sub‐genre which often poses particular problems for presenters. A move analysis of the CP introductions shows that their rhetorical structure is markedly different from that of the research article, and that these differences are closely related to the contextual and epistemological characteristics of the genre. The interpersonal relations set up by the allocation of speaker and addressee roles through the use of personal pronouns are also discussed. Through a contrastive analysis of the CP introductions and those of the corresponding proceedings papers, the article examines how speakers facilitate information processing and create rapport with the audience. The data comprise video recordings of 44 CPs from 3 scientific fields (geology, medicine, and physics) and a smaller corpus of 13 corresponding articles from the physics conference proceedings.