The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. It is available in fifteen languages: Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.
The September 2026 release of ELSST (Version 7) includes revisions to the Science and Technology hierarchy and related terms. The revision was needed to ensure that the thesaurus reflects modern society.
The changes include the addition of terms to cover new technologies, and the deprecation of terms representing outdated technologies. New concepts include smart technology, facial recognition, autonomous vehicles, drones, wearable technology, digital humanities, teleconferencing, citizen science and body mass index. Other terms added are deepfake, fitness trackers and webinars. Deprecated concepts include telex, telegraphy and fax transmission.
New or changed definitions include the addition of a definition to the term “disinformation” (false information spread deliberately in order to deceive people), and the addition of the concept “immersive technology” together with its definition (a broad category of technologies that create a sense of presence or immersion in a simulated or enhanced environment; it includes virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality).
All language versions have been updated in version 7 except for Icelandic and Romanian where no new translations have been added to this release.
ELSST also continues to promote FAIR principles. Two presentations focusing on ELSST were given at the European DDI (EDDI) conference in November–December 2025: METACURATE-ML: Approaches to conceptual equivalence across languages and Improving metadata consistency in longitudinal research through controlled vocabulary realignment.
For more information, see the ELSST documentation, including the Version 7 Release notes.
Background
ELSST is owned and published by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). The thesaurus is used for data discovery within CESSDA and facilitates access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary. It covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology, and environmental science.
The UK Data Service is funded as Service Owner for ELSST by CESSDA. The Service Owner is responsible for hosting the thesaurus management system, where content is updated, and for managing and delivering the updated content to the CESSDA web platform, hosted by CESSDA. UK Data Service staff work collaboratively with translators from CESSDA Service Provider organisations to update ELSST content to ensure coverage reflects the changing nature of international social science research.
More information: