Categories of submitters and explanations
| Category | Explanation |
| Academia | Included individual academics and academic groups |
| Healthcare | Included healthcare associations and health professionals |
| Industry | Included companies, industry associations and individuals from industry |
| Individual consumers | Category only used when provided in the submitter information |
| Mixed associations | Defined as associations comprising at least one industry and non-industry organisation |
| Federal government | Category only used when provided in the submitter information |
| Spam | Recorded when the comment content was clearly not related to the content of the FDA document |
| Other | Recorded when the submitter was not one of the above categories but was identifiable. An example was the US Technology Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery |
| Unknown | Recorded when no category was listed in the submitter information, insufficient information was provided to identify the submitter category (ie, a name, but no affiliation was provided) and when the commenter was listed as ‘Anonymous’. |
FDA, Food and Drug Administration.