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 November 2025 release of ELSST (Version 6) includes revisions to the demography hierarchy and related terms. The revision was needed to ensure that the thesaurus reflects modern society and meets ELSST’s stated aims of diversity and inclusivity. The changes, which were made in consultation with international demography experts, include additional terms to improve coverage of vital statistics (such as births, marriages, cohabitation, civil partnerships and deaths) and updated definitions for existing terms.

ELSST also continues to promote FAIR principles. Two presentations on this topic were given at the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST) 2025 conference in June 2025: The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST): Keeping it FAIR and Translating ELSST into Slovenian: Challenges in supporting Open Science and FAIR Principles. All language versions have been updated in Version 6 except for Icelandic, Romanian and Swedish  where no new translations have been added to this release.

For more information see the ELSST documentation, including the Version 6 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.