  Using an SPH simulation of a star-forming region in a molecular cloud, we
show that the emergence of a clump mass function (CMF) resembling the stellar
initial mass function (IMF) is a ubiquitous feature of molecular cloud
structure, but caution against its over-interpretation. We employ three
different techniques to extract the clumps in this study. In the first two, we
interpolate the SPH particle data to 2 and 3 dimensional grids before
performing the clump-find, using position-position (PP) and
position-position-velocity (PPV) information respectively. In the last
technique, the clump-finding is performed on the SPH data directly, making use
of the full 3 dimensional position information. Although the CMF is typically
similar to that observed in regions of nearby star formation, the individual
clumps and their masses are found to be unreliable since they depend strongly
on the parameters and the method of the clump-finding. In particular we find
that the resolution and orientation of the data make a significant difference
to the resulting properties of the identified clumps in the PP and PPV cases.
We conclude that making comparisons between a CMF and the stellar IMF should be
done with caution, since the definition of a clump boundary, and hence the
number of clumps and their properties, are arbitrary in the extraction method.
This is especially true if molecular clouds are truly scale free.
