Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus (retired and replaced by ELSST in January 2025)

For many years UKDS studies have been indexed with terms from the Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET). HASSET has been ‘retired’ in January 2025, and HASSET keywords in the UKDS catalogue have been replaced with keywords from the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST).

The decision to change over to ELSST was taken as ELSST is more up to date and is reviewed regularly, due to dedicated funding. Also, ELSST is versioned, meaning that outdated concepts (keywords) are deprecated, not deleted. This is important for the application of the FAIR principles, as deprecated concepts are still linkable in the thesaurus.

Previous abstract until January 2025:

"The Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET) is the leading British English thesaurus for the social sciences. It was originally developed from the UNESCO thesaurus, becoming a separate product in 1997. HASSET is a working tool for the keyword annotation and retrieval of UK Data Service data. It consists of over 4,000 concepts and covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology, history and, increasingly, environmental science.

The thesaurus can be used to find studies in the UK Data Service Data Catalogue. These studies include large-scale government surveys, international macrodata, business microdata, qualitative studies, historical studies and census data.

Revisions to HASSET concepts and structures aim to keep abreast with developments in social science and humanities."