metagear:Comprehensive Research Synthesis Tools for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis

Functionalities for facilitating systematic reviews, data extractions, and meta-analyses. It includes a GUI (graphical user interface) to help screen the abstracts and titles of bibliographic data; tools to assign screening effort across multiple collaborators/reviewers and to assess inter- reviewer reliability; tools to help automate the download and retrieval of journal PDF articles from online databases; figure and image extractions from PDFs; web scraping of citations; automated and manual data extraction from scatter-plot and bar-plot images; PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) flow diagrams; simple imputation tools to fill gaps in incomplete or missing study parameters; generation of random effects sizes for Hedges' d, log response ratio, odds ratio, and correlation coefficients for Monte Carlo experiments; covariance equations for modelling dependencies among multiple effect sizes (e.g., effect sizes with a common control); and finally summaries that replicate analyses and outputs from widely used but no longer updated meta-analysis software (i.e., metawin). Funding for this package was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) grants DBI-1262545 and DEB-1451031. CITE: Lajeunesse, M.J. (2016) Facilitating systematic reviews, data extraction and meta-analysis with the metagear package for R. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 7, 323-330 <doi:10.1111/2041-210X.12472>.