We review theoretical and phenomenological aspects of heavy flavour production as discussed in the heavy flavour working group of the DIS 2012. Recent theoretical progress includes approximate NNLO calculations for heavy quark structure functions in
deep inelastic scattering, the extension of the ACOT heavy flavour scheme to jet production, and advances in top physics where the highlight is clearly the first complete NNLO QCD prediction for top pair production in the $q bar{q}$ annihilation channel. Furthermore, state of the art phenomenological predictions for open charm and bottom, charmonium, and single top and top pair production are discussed in addition to other topics such as the effect of double parton scattering on heavy quark production. New measurements on charm and beauty production presented in the heavy flavor working group are summarized and discussed in comparison with QCD predictions. Top quark strong and weak couplings as well as top quark properties are being measured with precision at the LHC and the Tevatron. We summarize also recent results on spectroscopy of charmonia, bottomonia and $b$-hadrons, along with studies of their decays and properties. Searches for physics beyond Standard Model through precise measurements of rare decays of heavy flavours are discussed as well.
With recent advances in the precision of inclusive lepton--nuclear scattering experiments, it has become apparent that comparable improvements are needed in the accuracy of the theoretical analysis tools. In particular, when extracting parton distrib
ution functions in the large-x region, it is crucial to correct the data for effects associated with the nonzero mass of the target. We present here a comprehensive review of these target mass corrections (TMC) to structure functions data, summarizing the relevant formulas for TMCs in electromagnetic and weak processes. We include a full analysis of both hadronic and partonic masses, and trace how these effects appear in the operator product expansion and the factorized parton model formalism, as well as their limitations when applied to data in the x->1 limit. We evaluate the numerical effects of TMCs on various structure functions, and compare fits to data with and without these corrections.
