A contrast of meta and metafor packages for meta-analyses in R.

Abstract

There is extensive choice in R to support meta‐analyses.Two packages in this ecosystem include meta and metafor and provide an excellent opportunity to apply a structured checklist previously developed for contrasts between R packages relevant to challenges in ecology and evolution.Meta is a direct, intuitive choice for rapid implementation of general meta‐analytical statistics. Metafor is a comprehensive package best suited for relatively more complex models.Both packages provide estimates of heterogeneity, excellent visualization tools, and functions to explore publication bias.The package metafor has a steeper learning curve but greater rewards. Reference to the learning curve and capacities of the statistical software Stata provided a benchmark outside the R ecosystem and confirmed the consistency in statistics.The usefulness of meta‐analyses is not just in the synthesis of the research but in the process of doing the scientific synthesis. Reporting of contrasts and checks for robust statistics is an important contribution to more transparent and reproducible scientific syntheses.