The metafor Package

As a follow-up to yesterday's note, it is maybe worth mentioning that I also added two functions that are especially useful for those conducting network meta-analyses with the metafor package. With the to.wide() function, one can rearrange a dataset that is in an arm-based 'long' format to a contrast-based 'wide' format. Two examples illustrating the use of this function can be found under help(to.wide) (the link takes you to the corresponding help file, which is nicely formatted and shows the output of the examples). Once the dataset is in such a wide format, an important next step is the construction of variables that reflect which two groups are being compared with each other in each row (through +1, 0, -1 coding). Such a contrast matrix can be easily created with the contrmat() function. See help(contrmat) for the help file and two examples illustrating its use. The analysis of these two datasets (using arm- and contrast-based models) are illustrated under help(dat.hasselblad1998) and help(dat.hasselblad1998).

Just submitted a new version (2.4-0) to CRAN. This update was prompted by the upcoming change in R where the new default will be stringsAsFactors=FALSE (at long last!). As a result, some tests were failing on R-devel, so these needed fixing. Along the way, I made various minor internal updates and added some convenience functionality to several functions. The full changelog can be found here.