Impact of higher order and soft gluon corrections on the extraction of higher twist effects in DIS

The impact of recently calculated next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections and soft gluon resummations on the extraction of higher twist contributions to the deep-inelastic structure function F-2 is studied using the BCDMS and SLAC data. It is demonstrated to which extent the need for higher twist terms is diminishing due to these higher order effects in the kinematical region, 0.35 less than or equal to x less than or equal to 0.85 and Q(2) > 1.2 GeV2, investigated. In addition, theoretical uncertainties in the extraction of higher twist contributions are discussed, and comparisons to results obtained previously are made. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.