Naming a section on responsible persons in a study report

Question

Imagine you have a pharmacological study report, and one section of the report lists the persons who performed the study. That section is basically a table: name \ position \ responsibility. How would you name the section in the Table of Contents?

I came up with three options:

4. Responsible persons

and

4. Responsibility

and

4. Personnel (or "Study personnel"?)

I'm not sure how this section would be routinely called in English. In Russian, it is "ispolniteli" ("those who perform" or "performers" or "carry-outers" if you will)

P.S.

I found that I added the term "study staff" in my Anki glossary a while ago. I was reviewing it this morning and discovered it.

Answer 1

The term "researcher" may be what you want (from Oxford Dictionaries):

researcher
A person who carries out academic or scientific research:
"a medical researcher who pioneered the development of antibiotics"

This would be appropriate for listing the people conducting the study if those people are doing work that requires some knowledge of pharmacology or work that was central to the study. If your list included people doing other tasks which didn't require pharmacological knowledge, you could refer to one of those people as an:

assistant
A person who ranks below a senior person:
"the managing director and his assistant"
[AS MODIFIER]: "an assistant manager"

[WITH ADJECTIVE OR NOUN MODIFIER] A person who helps in particular work:
"a care assistant"

In this case specifically, you might call them a lab assistant.

Again, depending on their role, you may also call them a:

technician
A person employed to look after technical equipment or do practical work in a laboratory:
"a laboratory technician"

If you had a mixture of these roles, I think the option which would best convey that they were responsible for the carrying out of the study would be personnel. You wouldn't need to prepend "study" because it would be obvious from context that these were the personnel who conducted the study.

However, I don't have experience writing academic papers. There may be an established convention or terminology that someone with experience can suggest.

Answer 2

You may have been tempted to use the word to executers, from to execute which means to carry out, but execute has strong implications that makes it not work outside of legal, penal, or business contexts.

Execution as a noun, though, can mean "thing that is carried out" in a more general sense.

So you can say "Study Execution* to refer to things regarding carrying out the study. A group of people who work together and share responsibility is a team, so "Study Execution Team" may be a good idea. "Implementation Team" may also be a good choice.

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Other options from looking at what is offered by Google Translate, none of which really work IMHO:

• Performers has a strong implication of "performing in a play/movie/some form of entertainment" and should not be used.

• Implementers is more inline with the literal meaning but it's not a common word and sounds clumsy.

• Administrators - an administrator manages work but may not do much work themselves. E.g. the administrator may have written the report but not necessarily done the tasks described in the report.

• Minister - has a strong implication of being a government agency or religious leader.