What is ELSST?
The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences, owned and published by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). ELSST is a working tool to help you retrieve the data from the UK Data Service collection which best relate to your field of research or interest. ELSST is also used to retrieve data within the CESSDA Data Catalogue (CDC). You can download ELSST for free.
ELSST is available in 15 languages. The English version has over 3400 Preferred terms and more than 2700 Alternative terms. Labels are updated with every thesaurus revision ensuring that this tool keeps abreast with the latest terminology used in social science and humanities literature.
Why use ELSST?
Studies in the UK Data Service collection are all assigned English keywords drawn from ELSST and linked to it, enabling you to learn more about the concepts and navigate through the thesaurus structure to find other appropriate terms to search for in the data catalogue. ELSST terms can also be downloaded in JSON, RDF/XML and Turtle (.ttl).
Note that catalogue records may also contain additional unlinked keywords that are not included in ELSST, but which still describe topics covered in the study.
The thesaurus team is pleased to accept suggestions for new ELSST terms from data users and licensees. Access information on contributing to ELSST.