This site uses cookies

Some of these cookies are essential, while others help us to improve your experience by providing insights into how the site is being used.

For more detailed information please check our Cookie notice.

Necessary cookies

Necessary cookies enable core functionality. This website cannot function properly without these cookies.

Cookies that measure website use

If you provide permission, we will use Google Analytics to measure how you use the website so we can improve it based on our understanding of user needs. Google Analytics sets cookies that store anonymised information about how you got to the site, the pages you visit, how long you spend on each page and what you click on while you're visiting the site.

We will be closed from 17.00 on Friday 20 December 2024 and reopen with the University of Essex on Thursday 2 January 2025.

Season’s Greetings to all our users.

The UK's largest digital collection of social sciences and population research data

Controlled vocabularies

ELSST is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences, owned and published by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA).

It was originally based on the Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET) which was owned and developed by the UK Data Archive from the 1970s to 2021.

ELSST is currently available in 15 languages: Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish, and contains over 3,4 00 concepts. We use it to index our data collections at study, question and variable level. The thesaurus allows retrieval of data and related documentation using hierarchies of keywords.

It is also used for data discovery within CESSDA, including the CESSDA Data Catalogue (CDC) and thus facilitates access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary. The UK Data Archive co-ordinates ELSST on behalf of CESSDA and works with other European data archives to develop its content and facilitate translation.

Some key facts about ELSST:

  • Covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and environmental science.
  • Follows ISO 25964: Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies as far as possible.
  • Is available in the Linked Open Data format, SKOS.

UK Data Archive
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
CO4 3SQ

Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

University of Essex
E.S.R.C Economic and Social Research Council

  Copyright 2002-2024 University of Essex