Skip to main content
All CollectionsPast Releases on PulsarJune 2019
New Data Source on TRAC: SERMO, the Leading Global Social Network for Doctors
New Data Source on TRAC: SERMO, the Leading Global Social Network for Doctors

PAST RELEASES - JUNE 2019

Linda Maruta avatar
Written by Linda Maruta
Updated over a week ago

With 800,000 global active members, from 96 specialties in the medical field, SERMO is the leading social network for doctors, encouraging knowledge sharing and medical crowdsourcing. It's an online space that facilitates relevant and authentic conversations amongst fully verified and licensed doctors in the US and globally. 

And today we are pleased to announce the beta trial of SERMO as the latest addition to our ever increasing and diverse library of data sources.


Doctors on SERMO are allowed to freely, openly and anonymously (if they wish to) discuss issues relating to health, diagnosis, medicine, and treatments with a community of fully verified physicians. This invaluable data goes to complement the other medical conversations happening around the web on other social networks and forums – which are of course available on TRAC. So with access to SERMO data, Pulsar can now harness the collective wisdom of doctors, giving you pure and unadulterated insight from medical professionals about their views and opinions on any medical subject. 

SERMO data is available starting today on TRAC, in Topic searches. Below are some key facts about our integration and what you can expect from this new data source.

  • For every post collected, we also get the entire comments thread, plus the number of comments.

  • In the event that there is a comment or comments that contain your keywords, but the original post where those comments have been submitted does not contain your keywords, we will also collect the post and the entire comments thread. 

  • SERMO provides the following author information: speciality (e.g. physiotherapist), location (i.e. country of practice), and language. 

  • Historical data is available for the last 36 months.


There are some limitations with the SERMO integration you will need to be aware of due to the API as well as privacy. These include the following:

  • SERMO searches support single keywords or phrases in OR only at search setup.

  • There is a keywords limit of 50 single terms or phrases at search setup.

  • Any personally identifiable information is anonymized, so we do not provide author username, author name, author bio, or gender. Consequently, we are unable to visualize the Influencers Authors & Network graphs.

  • We do not provide direct links to the SERMO website to view posts online.

  • When you run a Historical data preview we are provided with a total for the entire interval selected and there is no daily breakdown. To plot the historics preview line graph, we average the total expected contents.

  • Engagements are comments only, no likes. We do have plans in the future to add a post rating. 

SERMO is currently available in Beta and as a Pulsar client, you will be able to start exploring this data source throughout the duration of our Beta Trial.

If you have a valid use case and you'd like to access this data source, then please reach out to your Account Manager to discuss your use case and how you can start using SERMO data. Following the Beta Trial, we will evaluate client feedback and keep you informed on any plans for General Availability launch. 

Did this answer your question?