The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. It is available in sixteen languages: Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

The September 2023 release of ELSST (Version 4) includes the revision of the CIVIL STATUS hierarchy, and the introduction of new concepts (terms) reflecting changes in working and learning/teaching environments associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

A major focus in the latest content development phase of ELSST was to increase diversity and inclusivity of our concepts. Our approach is outlined in our new Inclusivity statement and described in a presentation the ELSST team gave at the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST) 2023 conference in May.

All language versions have been updated except for Danish and Romanian where no new translations have been added to this release.

In addition, ELSST’s Skosmos interface has been updated, including an additional tab to display new and deprecated concepts.

For more information see the ELSST documentation, including the Version 4 Release notes.

Background

ELSST is owned and published by 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.