Gluon-initiated contributions to deep-inelastic-scattering processes, such as charm production, can be comparable in magnitude to the ``leading-order'' sea-quark processes. A proper next-to-leading-order calculation in QCD confirms this and yields distinct dependences of these two contributions on the kinematic variables and on the charm-quark mass. These results imply that previous analyses of charm-production data to extract the strange and charm content of the nucleon, as well as the precise determination of standard-model parameters based on these analyses, need to be reassessed.
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Aivazis et al. (1990) studied this question.
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