The two principal groups which were involved in the conflict over element naming were:
* An American group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
* A Russian group at Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna.
and, as a kind of arbiter,
* The IUPAC Commission on Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry, which introduced its own proposal to the IUPAC General Assembly.
The German group at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, who had (undisputedly) discovered elements 107 to 109, were dragged into the controversy when the Commission suggested that the name "hahnium", proposed for element 105 by the Americans, be used for GSI's element 108 instead.