metamedian: Meta-Analysis of Medians
The metamedian package implements several methods to meta-analyze
studies that report the sample median of the outcome. When the primary
studies are one-group studies, the methods of McGrath et
al. (2019) and Ozturk and
Balakrishnan (2020) can be applied to
estimate the pooled median. In the two-group context, the methods of
McGrath et al. (2020a) can be
applied to estimate the pooled difference of medians across groups.
Additionally, this package implements a number of methods to estimate the study-specific means and their standard errors from studies reporting sample medians in order to estimate the pooled (difference of) means. Specifically, one can apply the following methods in this context:
- Hozo et al. (2005)
- Wan et al. (2014)
- Bland (2015)
- Luo et al. (2018)
- Shi et al. (2020a)
- Shi et al. (2020b)
- McGrath et al. (2020b)
- Cai et al. (2021)
- Yang et al. (2022)
- McGrath et al. (2023)
- Shi et al. (2023)
Installation
You can install the released version of metamedian from CRAN with:
install.packages("metamedian")After installing the devtools package (i.e., calling
install.packages(devtools)), the development version of metamedian
can be installed from GitHub with:
devtools::install_github("stmcg/metamedian")Usage
See McGrath et al. (in press) for a
detailed guide on using the metamedian package.