Terms and date limits of searches within bioRxiv, medRxiv and arXiv repositories addressing five pathogens causing epidemics within the last five years. Searches were conducted for any of the respective search terms (equivalent to Boolean ‘OR’) and excluded any results matching terms under ‘exclusions’ (equivalent to Boolean ‘NOT’). Searches were limited to results between start date (defined as first official health authority notification of a case cluster, or for influenza, start of the 2019 seasonal influenza period) and end date (defined as two years from start date for epidemics before 2019, otherwise defined as the date of analysis).