This is a guest post by Andreas Kempf.
This question is best answered with the STW Thesaurus for Economics, a domain-specific controlled vocabulary maintained by the ZBW German National Library of Economics, the world’s largest information centre for economic literature.
The same content could be described by different keywords. A controlled vocabulary serves to minimize this semantic ambiguity by grouping synonymous terms and defining preferred labels used for indexing. This way, it ensures consistency in the storage of the literature in a database and facilitates uniform access to documents that pertain to similar subject matter. Complementary to the JEL classification codes which allow for a disciplinary classification of a paper, a thesaurus aids a more fine-grained and poly-dimensional description of a document.
Developed in the mid-1990s and since then constantly updated according to the current terminology usage in the latest international economic research literature, the STW Thesaurus for Economics covers all sub-fields both in the economics as well as in business economics and business practice. To select subject headings from the STW, an autosuggest service is available.
You may also download STW Thesaurus for Economics here. To stay updated about any news concerning STW please register at stw-announce. To ask questions and to get in contact with other STW users please register at stw-user.
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