An Application of R on Analyzing Meta-Analysis for Research: Health Science Context

Abstract

There is an ever-increasing number of publications using meta-analyses, but Thai academics and Thai researchers still have very little use of the R program for meta-analysis in the health sciences research context, including teaching the use of R in statistical analysis for research. Therefore, in this research article, the objectives are 1. to synthesize documents for meta-analysis using the basic R program and 2) to suggest guidelines for researchers to conduct additional studies beyond meta-analysis basic.

The research results found that. 1. Basic meta-analysis had shown that R could perform basic meta-analysis no worse than any other program. This research article would divide the presentation of basic meta-analysis into 2 Parts. Part 1 introduced the concept of systematic literature review (Systematic Review), which consisted of 2 sub-parts as follows: Sub-part 1) discussed the application of PICO to clearly define research questions as a basis for selection. into the literature for meta-analysis next, and in the second sub-part was the application of PRISMA to explain the inclusion and exclusion of studies that would be used for meta-analysis next in the section Second, a meta-analysis using R program on relevant topics according to international principles was introduced. Starting from importing the dataset for further meta-analysis, the meta-analysis would display the analysis results in the form of text (Text Output), and analysis of various sub-statistics. Important factors required in reporting research results included the pooled effect size in the form of Common (Fixed) effect and Random effect, as well as Test of heterogeneity analysis. There was also a visual analysis of the Forest plot and Funnel plot related to Publication bias analysis.

2. The guidelines for researchers to conduct additional studies that were higher than basic meta-analysis was to be able to use the R program to conduct a meta-analysis that was comprehensive had a high standard and had many capabilities that may be higher than the program. For this reason, Thai academics and Thai researchers could use the R program to conduct meta-analyses and publish in world-leading journals, no different from international researchers who had used the R program. It was used in meta-analyses in the context of health sciences and published in world-class journals.