Concept mapping is a method developed by William Trochim in the 1980s to explore a group’s shared understanding of a specific issue (1985). However, the term had already been used in the 1970s to describe a technique developed by Joseph Novak for visualizing relationships between different concepts (1977). This overlap likely led Trochim (1989) to adopt the term “group concept mapping” to better distinguish the two methods.
At Polygon, we have chosen to call our tool Concept Mapping (CM) as it remains the most widely used term in scientific literature. However, we refer to both terms in our communications and product documentation.
