A QCD analysis of the world data on polarized deep inelastic scattering is presented in next-to-leading order, including the heavy flavor Wilson coefficient in leading order in the fixed flavor number scheme. New parameterizations are derived for the quark and gluon distributions and the value of α s (M 2 z ) is determined. The impact of the variation of both the renormalization and factorization scales on the distributions and the value of α s is studied. We obtain α NLO s (M 2 Z ) = 0.1132

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... 0056 −0.0095 . The first moments of the polarized twist-2 parton distribution functions are calculated with correlated errors to allow for comparisons with results from lattice QCD simulations. Potential higher twist contributions to the structure function g 1 (x, Q 2 ) are determined both for proton and deuteron targets.