Concept Maps for Brainstorming

Concept Maps allow you to organize the terms that you come up with when you are brainstorming. For example, imagine you have to write a paper on the incidence of plagiarism among college students. Your concept map might start off looking something like this.

plagiarism

The first thing we want to do is think of synonyms for our main topic. Words and phrases like academic dishonesty, cheating and poor citing and paraphrasing would be good. We add them to the concept map.

plagiarism
academic dishonesty		poor citing & paraphrasing
cheating

The next term we want to think about is our secondary topic which is the college student population. We will want synonyms for this topic as well. We add them to the concept map.

college
university		higher education
plagiarism
academic dishonesty		poor citing & paraphrasing
cheating

Next, we want to know the incidence, so we need statistics. How many students have been accused, punished or admit to plagiarism when surveyed anonymously. We add these terms to the concept map.

		college
students accused		university		higher education
students punished		plagiarism
students admit when surveyed		academic dishonesty		poor citing & paraphrasing
		cheating

Finally, we may also be interested in the causes, like student's feeling pressure to get good grades or being unethical. We add these terms to the concept map.

		college
students accused		university		higher education	didn't know they were plagiarizing
students punished		plagiarism				unethical
students admit when surveyed		academic dishonesty		poor citing & paraphrasing	pressure to get good grades
		cheating

Now that we have completed our concept map, we can use it to create searches for online resources, like article databases or search engines.

(plagiarism OR cheating) AND (college OR university)

plagiarism AND college AND survey

This search should find materials about surveys of plagiarism in colleges.

cheating AND university AND pressure