Charm in the nucleon

A next-to-leading order analysis of inelastic electroproduction of charm is performed using an interpolating scheme which maps smoothly onto massless: QCD evolution at large Q(2) and photon-gluon fusion at small Q(2). In contr ast with earlier analyses, this:scheme allows the inclusion of quark and ta rget mass effects and heavy quark thresholds, as well as possible non-pertu rbative, or intrinsic; charm contributions. We find no conclusive evidence in favor of an intrinsic charm component in the nucleon, although several d ata points which disagree with perturbative QCD expectations will need to b e checked by future experiments.