Using the site

Welcome to Health Security Net, a publicly accessible, centralized library housing decades of documents, published prior to 2020, related to threat and risk awareness for pandemic-prone diseases.

Learn what guidance decision makers used, prior to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, to prepare for, respond to, and recover from pandemics.

Documents on this site include:

  • Research
  • Government reviews
  • Expert analyses
  • Hearings

Search for specific documents using keywords and filters, or browse by topic, specific event, publishing organization, and more.

Documents can be bookmarked to view later or downloaded directly (where available).

A webinar highlighting the Health Security Net site, and particularly the surge capacity research effort, is available here. The webinar features an overview to the project, methods for the collection of surge capacity documents, and an introduction to how country programs can benefit from the tool as evidenced by local leaders in Tajikistan.

Learn to use the Global Health Security Library

  1. Search by specific filters
  2. Browse documents
  3. Download metadata on results by topic
  4. View document details and similar documents
  5. Bookmark a document
  6. Preview and download document (if available)

Search by specific filters on the Search page

If you have a specific search query in mind, navigate to the ​Search​ page in order to narrow your results by the available filters.

Apply filters by clicking on a category to expand the dropdown list, and checking one or more available options. Continue to add filters until you are satisfied with the scope of your results.

To clear your filters, click the Clear all button.

Available filters:

  • Year: year the publication was published
  • Topic area:​ key topic addressed by the work
  • Publishing org type:​ type of organization responsible for publishing
  • Publishing organization: organization that published the work or led the effort
  • Event: specific outbreak event covered by the record
  • Funder: organization that provides funding for the research effort or publication
  • Document type: ​the type of document containing the research

Browse documents on the Explore page

If you don’t have a specific search query in mind, navigate to the ​Explore​ page to browse the documents by category (the categories are the same as the Search page).

Results are default sorted by number of results in each category, from most to least.

Sorting can be adjusted by clicking here: Sorting controls

Download metadata on results by topic

If you want to understand the full scope of all available documents for any given search query, download an excel sheet of metadata for your results.

Click the Download results button in the upper lefthand corner of your list of results.

An excel sheet will download to your computer containing all of the available metadata for the filtered documents.

View document details and similar documents

To view more information about a document resulting from your search query, click one of two buttons to expand the document detail.

Clicking the View details button will expand the document details in a popup on your current page.

Clicking the Open in new tab button will expand an identical document details page in a new tab.

Scrolling down the document details popup or page will reveal suggestions for similar items that might be of interest.

Bookmark a document

If you want to save documents to the site to view another time, bookmark an item to access it later on the ​Bookmarks ​page.

To bookmark an item, click the Empty bookmark icon. Bookmarked items will display a Filled bookmark icon.

This icon will be available in either the document preview card (in your list of results) or on the document detail page.

The ​Bookmarks​ tab will display the number of documents that you have bookmarked:

Bookmarks tab view, showing 3 bookmarks

To unbookmark an item, click the Filled bookmark icon again.

Preview and download document (if available)

To view a document, you may either preview the document within your browser, or download the document to your files.

Clicking the Preview button will open a popup view of the document

Clicking the Open and download button will open the document in a new tab.

From either the popup or the new tab, you can click the Print button or the Download button in the upper righthand corner to print or download the document, respectively.

Note: Some documents are not available for preview or download.

Welcome to Health Security Net, a publicly accessible, centralized library housing decades of documents related to pandemics.

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