The first scientific paper on this technique was published in 1994 by Jean-Charles Cuillandre. Read his narrative here.
Dr. Bland-Hawthorn's early development work took place at the AAT during 1994 and 1995 where he first referred to the operation as "nod & shuffle spectroscopy". Read his narrative here.
Since 1997, GDDS team-member Karl Glazebrook and Anglo-Australian Observatory Astronomer Joss Bland-Hawthorn have successfully applied the technique to the study of faint galaxies using the Anglo-Australian Telescope. Their work laid the foundation for the GDDS. For more details on this work see their 2001 paper.
Definitions:
References:
'Va-et-Vient' spectroscopy: A new mode for faint object CCD spectroscopy with very large telescopes Astronomy & Astrophysics, Vol. 281, p. 603, 1994 see abstract here
Karl Glazebrook and Anglo-Australian Observatory Astronomer Joss Bland-Hawthorn's paper is here.
"Back and forth spectroscopy: optimization of an optical nod-and-shuffle technique to reach fainter objects and increase the multiplex gain on multi-object spectrographs" Proceedings of the SPIE, Vol. 4841, p. 1531, 2003 ftp://ftp.cfht.hawaii.edu/pub/daprog/jcc/bfspectro-spie2002.pdf
"Accurate sky Subtraction of Long-Slit Spectra: Velocity Dispersions at Sigma(v) = 24.0 Mag/arcsec2"
Sembach & Tonry's work on the N&S technique can be found here