An exploratory analysis of mind maps

Abstract

The results presented in this paper come from an exploratory study of 19,379 mind maps created by 11,179 users from the mind mapping applications 'Docear' and 'MindMeister'. The objective was to find out how mind maps are structured and which information they contain. The results include: A typical mind map is rather small, with 31 nodes on average (median), whereas each node usually contains between one to three words. In 66.12% of cases there are few notes, if any, and the number of hyperlinks tends to be rather low, too, but depends upon the mind mapping application. Most mind maps are edited only on one (60.76%) or two days (18.41%). It is to expect that a typical user creates around 2.7 mind maps (mean) a year. However, there are exceptions which create a long tail. One user created 243 mind maps, the largest mind map contained 52,182 nodes, one node contained 7,497 words and one mind map was edited on 142 days.