The Population code described the ‘types’ of people involved in the project, reassuringly this included all stakeholders including patients, carers, healthcare staff and the designers themselves. The child codes were applied for each type of participant mentioned in the abstract, meaning that generally more instances of this code appear in the abstracts than other codes. The code relates to the people who were involved with the research, not the intended audience or user group for the research output.

The code Adult refers to these people for whom another category is not appropriate. Patients are coded under this term when no other identifier is given, but also the code is used for people who live with a chronic condition but, in terms of the research, are not defined as patients of a healthcare system. As such, for projects that focus on a person’s self-management or life in the community, their capacity as people (rather than patients) is recorded with the code Adult.