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Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives

ELSST – 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 3,300 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 16 languages: Danish, Dutch, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.

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Creative Commons Licence

ELSST is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Attribution: Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and its national Service Providers.

Recommended Citation: CESSDA and Service Providers (2023) The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) (Version 4), https://elsst.cessda.eu. DOI


The translations have been contributed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 by the following institutions:

The Danish National Archives, Denmark;
Data Archiving and Networked Services, The Netherlands;
Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS), Switzerland;
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany;
The Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic;
Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania;
National Centre for Social Research, Greece;
Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research – Sikt, Norway;
Romanian Social Data Archive, Romania;
The Swedish National Data Service, University of Gothenburg, Sweden;
Tampere University Foundation sr, Finland;
University of Essex, United Kingdom;
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences, Slovenia;
Centre for Social Sciences Research Documentation Centre (TK KDK), Hungary;
and DATICE - The Icelandic Social Science Data Service, Iceland.