Drawing Circles and Lines: A Critical Look at Mind Maps for Literature Reviews

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Mind maps promise a great deal. Organise your thoughts! Find connections! Make structure fun! And it’s true. It can be fun. We can spend many happy hours putting our ideas into colourful bubble shapes and connecting them with lines. 

It feels like progress. But is it? Let’s say you’re doing a study on mindfulness practices and productivity at work. In a typical mind map, the main topic would be in a big circle at the centre, maybe ‘Mindfulness at Work’. 

Radiating out from this central point towards the corners and edges of the page would be related themes, each in a smaller circle, such as productivity, stress reduction, organisational culture, focus, and criticisms. And each of these sub-themes would generate even smaller topic bubbles based on what the papers in each cluster tended to cover. Stress reduction, for example, might have bubbles representing papers on burn-out reduction, emotional regulation, and improved moods. 


Circles, Lines, and Dead Ends 

You sit back and look at your map, satisfied. You’ve accounted for everything you’ve collected and captured all the salient themes. You can write it up now. You devise your version of the classic first line: There have been many studies on mindfulness at work. You look at your mind map and frown. Where to go next? Your bubbles radiate out equally in every direction, so you just pick one. For example, there are studies on productivity. It feels a bit anaemic, but you carry on. There also studies on stress reduction. Hmm. And there are studies on organisational culture . . . 

And there it is. Your mind map has landed you in the description trap: There are studies on this, and there are studies on that, and there are studies on this other thing, and so on and so forth. 

What’s Gone Wrong? 

Mind maps are an exceptionally good way to capture and visually represent that first brain dump, the wonderfully generative but chaotic swirl of ideas with which you started. But they are only the first step.

While they may help you get a handle on your initial ideas, they don’t help you develop an argument with those ideas. They are oddly silent on the question of how all the topic areas you’ve identified add up to why your research question should be asked. Why is that? The lines on a mind map all represent and relationships, the quickest way to relate ideas, but also the easiest and least insightful. With a mind map, you don’t have to carefully articulate what previous studies have actually found and not found. 

'Mind maps help you get a handle on your initial ideas. But they don't help you develop an argument with those ideas. For that, you need an argument map.'

And since you don’t have to do that, you aren’t identifying patterns and trends in those findings to identify contrasts, tensions, and gaps. With a mind map, it is hard to spot relationships like these: While a number of studies have found a positive relationship between mindfulness and productivity (Smith 2010; Jones 2015; Cherry 2023), these have all been qualitative investigations relying on participant self-report. Studies citing cold hard numbers are few and far between (Birch 2017; Ash 2026). Meanwhile, managers report concerns about lost time (Brown 2013; Green 2106), and a growing number of critiques (Apple 2014; Orange 2018; Pear 2020) worry that mindfulness may transfer responsibility for systemic problems onto individuals. A comprehensive study on mindfulness and its impact on productivity in the workplace is therefore in order. 

This is, of course, entirely hypothetical (including the references) but it demonstrates the difference between naming research topics, and marshalling findings as evidence in service of an argument. 

How Can You Fix It? 

If you want turn ideas into a persuasive case, you need to move from mind mapping to argument mapping. Argument maps don’t radiate from a central point. They are hierarchical, and the spaces for claims and


evidence tend to be rectangular, not circular. These visual differences are not just coincidental – they represent progress in your thinking. As you move from mind mapping to argument mapping, you are moving from a speculative exploration to a sterner, more logical evaluation. 

We can extend the metaphor a bit further. Think about what happens if you push a circle: it rolls, and disturbs another circle, which goes on to disturb another, and before you know it, your organised themes are ricocheting pinballs. Your structure has not stood up to pressure. But rectangles? They have a solidity about them, resting firmly on one of their longer sides – much harder to push around. They stay in place and hold their ground.

In your argument map, you state your central claim and put that at the top. And in order to do that, you need to know what your central claim is. You then lay out your key supporting points, horizontally underneath your central claim. And then underneath each of those points, you set out the more granular evidence you have for each one. 

The argument map is harder to do than a mind map, and you’ll have to build multiple versions and revise them many times. You might find that you have to scrap one entirely and start again. But argument mapping will show you where your evidence is strong, and where it isn’t; if your central claim will stand, or if it won’t; if you are proceeding logically or making wild leaps; if you have built a robust case that convinces, or a redundant description. 

So Should We Scrap Mind Maps? 

No – I'm not arguing for that. They are useful in the early phases of drafting, when you are generating all those ricocheting ideas and need to capture them. And because they are fun and provide a sense of progress, they can lower your resistance if you are having trouble starting. Both of those things are valuable and useful. 

Just don’t forget that you need to move to step two, the argument map. 😊

Your Blog Author 

Dr Susan Mandala is founding director of Writing Works Consulting. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was for many years an academic at the University of Sunderland, where her favourite role was training PhD candidates to write literature reviews. A specialist in the study of language, writing, and style, Susan has 30 years of experience as a teacher, trainer, and workshop facilitator. 

If you want more focused support with argument mapping, her signature workshop, How to Really Write Your Literature Review may be just what you need. It runs three times a year in October, January, and June (registration and payment through Eventbrite), so watch this space for when registrations next open. 

 If you want more information, feel free to contact me. I’d love to hear from you. 😊

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ‘Wonderful workshop! This gave me a method to organise my thoughts and build a strong structure for my future papers' – Justin Andrushko

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