Before our course

  1. Read a general overview of ‘metafor’, the principal R package that we will be during this course.
  2. Install R and RStudio.
  3. Install the following packages:
install.packages(c("metafor","compute.es","ggplot2","dplyr","reshape2","broom","tidyr"))
  1. If you already have R installed, please update it to the latest version:

install.packages('installr')
require('installr')
updateR()
  1. Update your packages to the latest version as well:
update.packages()

Course schedule & exercises

Throughout this course we will use data from NCEAS
You can download the data directly or download using the R code included in the exercises.

Day 1: Calculating effect sizes
Day 2: Hierarchical meta-analytical models
Day 3: Assumptions and biases
Day 4: Confounding effects and extra tricks

There is also a quick tutorial on how to build a phylogeny

Additional resources

General reference for how to implement meta-analysis in R: metafor’s website

New R packages for extracting summary data from figures digitize

ImageJ: open-source software for extracting summary data from figures ImageJ