European Language Social Science Thesaurus

The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. It is owned and published by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and its national Service Providers. The thesaurus consists of over 3,400 concepts and covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology, and environmental science.

ELSST is used for data discovery within CESSDA and facilitates access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary.

ELSST is currently available in 15 languages: Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.

A major development since the last release of the thesaurus is the link that has been established between the ELSST and the CESSDA Data Catalogue. The CESSDA Data Catalogue contains descriptions of more than 40,000 data collections held by CESSDA’s Service Providers, originating from over 20 European countries.