  In this paper we consider matter fields in a gravitational background in
order to compute the breaking of the conformal current at one-loop order.
Standard perturbative calculations of conformal symmetry breaking expressed by
the non-zero trace of the energy-momentum tensor have shown that some violating
terms are regularization dependent, which may suggest the existence of spurious
breaking terms in the anomaly. Therefore, we perform the calculation in a
momentum space regularization framework in which regularization dependent terms
are judiciously parametrized. We compare our results with those obtained in the
literature and conclude that there is an unavoidable arbitrariness in the
anomalous term $\Box R$.
