Return certain fields with .populate() from Mongoose

I’m not completely clear on what you mean by “returning a field”, but you can use a lean() query so that you can freely modify the output, then populate both fields and post-process the result to only keep the field you want:

.lean().populate('user', 'email.address facebook.address')
  .exec(function (err, subscription){ 
    if (subscription.user.email.address) {
        delete subscription.user.facebook;
    } else {
        delete subscription.user.email;
    }
  });