Visualising and Navigating Research with Google NotebookLM’s Mind Map Function

NotebookLM’s Mind Map function offers researchers a powerful way to quickly grasp the structure and key findings of any uploaded PDF, from academic papers to policy reports. By automatically generating an interactive visual overview, users can explore a study’s objectives, methods, results, and conclusions at a glance. Clicking on any node opens a targeted view with direct links to the relevant section of the original text. In this post, we demonstrate how this feature can be used in practice — showing step-by-step how to upload a document, navigate its mind map, and access the specific parts of the source most relevant to your research.

The first step in using NotebookLM’s Mind Map feature is to upload your source material. Files can be added directly from your computer (PDF, TXT, Markdown, or supported audio formats), linked from the web, pasted as text, or imported from Google Drive. For this demonstration, we uploaded our own article — Sebők, M., Máté, Á., Ring, O., Kovács, V., & Lehoczki, R. (2024). Leveraging Open Large Language Models for Multilingual Policy Topic Classification: The Babel Machine Approach. Social Science Computer Review — to explore how the mind map visualises its structure and findings.

Once the file is uploaded, NotebookLM automatically generates an interactive mind map summarising the document’s main sections and key points. Each branch can be expanded to reveal more detailed subtopics, making it easy to navigate the structure of complex research papers.

In this case, we were particularly interested in the Performance & Results section, which included the Hungarian budget domain: near-perfect (0.99) finding. By clicking on this node, we could launch the chat function directly from the mind map, prompting NotebookLM to provide an explanation grounded in the source material.

When a node is selected from the mind map, NotebookLM opens the chat interface with an automatically generated question based on that topic. The system then produces a detailed answer, grounded in the uploaded document, with inline references linking directly to the relevant sections of the source. This makes it easy to verify statements in context and to explore the original text without manual searching. From here, researchers can continue the conversation by posing follow-up questions, enabling deeper exploration of the study’s findings.

The chat responses are directly linked to the uploaded PDF, with inline citations pointing to the exact location in the source document. By clicking these references, the relevant passage from the original paper opens immediately, allowing researchers to verify the context, review the surrounding discussion, and easily extract quotations. This feature is particularly valuable for academic work, as it streamlines locating, understanding, and integrating key evidence from complex studies.

Recommendations

Google’s NotebookLM Mind Map feature offers a fast and structured way to process and understand even the most complex academic papers. Combining a visual overview with direct links to source material and an integrated chat for follow-up queries reduces the time needed to locate and interpret relevant information. For researchers, this means being able to focus more on analysis and synthesis, and less on manual navigation through lengthy texts. Whether used for initial familiarisation or targeted deep dives into specific sections, Google’s tool effectively makes dense scholarly content accessible, navigable, and ready for integration into ongoing research.