A Review of Meta-Analysis Packages in R

• Email: joshua.r.polanin@vanderbilt.edu
• Find this presentation: http://rpubs.com/polanin/meta-analysis_rpackages_useR2015

• Brief overview of meta-analysis software
• Finding meta-analytic R packages (methods)
• Investigating package capabilities (results)
• Conclusions

• Question What types of meta-analytic R packages are available and what are their capabilities?

• To answer that question:

  • Find ALL meta-analysis R packages
  • Summarize their capabilities
  • Suggest future packages and functions
  • Document help for future tutorials

• Searched multiple online repositories
  • CRAN
  • CRANtastic
  • Revolution R
• Screened packages for inclusion
• “Coded” (i.e., documented information) package capabilities

• What we coded?
  • Name, authors, date created, date updated, pdf location
  • Package specificity (i.e., general or specific), package type (i.e., bayesian, genome, general, plotting, etc.), dependencies
  • “Traditional” meta-analytic capabilities (effect sizes, fixed or random-effects models, moderator analyses)
  • Newer meta-analytic capabilities (power analyses, missing data, handles dependencies, publication biases)
  • Main function name
  • Other capabilities
  • Package downloads

Package characteristics

• N = 56
• All downloadable from CRAN
• Most updated recently
• Very wide range of capabilities and functionality
• Yet to find feature not available in one of these packages
• Package characteristics table

How often are they used?

Downloads per day (May 2015)

Source: local data frame [2 x 3]

  downloads ADD_Mean    ADD_SD
1      High 65.00806 22.984007
2       Low 10.29839  5.652116

High: n = 4 (metafor, rmeta, meta, epiR)

Low: n = 52 (all others)

How often are they used? (Compared to top packages)

Downloads per day (May 2015)

Source: local data frame [2 x 3]

  meta   ADD_Mean    ADD_SD
1   No 4186.50645 795.02563
2  Yes   14.20622  16.14225

• Top downloaded packages

 [1] "Rcpp"       "stringr"    "stringi"    "plyr"       "ggplot2"   
 [6] "magrittr"   "colorspace" "scales"     "digest"     "reshape2"  

• Power analyses packages or functions
• Greater plotting capabilities (most use metafor)
• Effect size calculations for non-traditional measures
• Documentation!

• Great capabilities
• Straightforward to use if comfortable with R
• Continued documentation and help will increase usage and application