Reading more of that, on page 347, they mention "Now consider the force carried by the shear studs attaching the floor beam to the floor slab when there was little or no lateral resistance provided by the girder" and, in the paragraph bridging pages 347-8, "The nominal capacity of a 3/4 in. stud is roughly 20 kip at room temperature (Chapter 11); thus one would expect that, when a floor beam is not restrained from thermally expanding, while the floor slab to which it is attached with shear studs is restrained due to its in-plane stiffness, the shear studs will fail and the floor beam will have little resistance to thermal expansion or to lateral-torsional buckling."
From this, it seems clear that the "shear studs" are a small (3/4 inch) connector between the floor beams and the floor slab. The elements labelled "studs" in the diagram of fig 5 of the paper cited would be what NIST is calling the "floor beams".
At the top of page 346, NCSTAR says, "In WTC 7, no studs were installed on the girders (Cantor 1985). Thus, in those locations where there were no opposing beams, resistance to thermal expansion of the floor beams would have been provided primarily by the lateral stiffness of the girder".
I suspect this was the "Gotcha!" phrase that superlogicalthinker is latched onto. Of course, we can see that they're discussing a completely different element that the "studs" labelled in that figure, and they only say they didn't exist in one part of the structure - on the girders. We should also note that they consistently make a distinction between the "girders" and the "floor beams" (See, for instance, their Fig. 8-19 on page 346). It's clear from the rest of the document that these shear studs did exist between the floor beams and floor slabs.
So, busted.
