metabias.rm5: Cochrane review: Test for funnel plot asymmetry

In meta: General Package for Meta-Analysis

Cochrane review: Test for funnel plot asymmetry

Description

Conduct a test for funnel plot asymmetry for all outcomes in a Cochrane review of intervention studies

Usage

## S3 method for class 'rm5'
metabias(
  x,
  comp.no,
  outcome.no,
  method.bias = "linreg",
  method.bias.binary = method.bias,
  method.bias.or = "score",
  k.min = 10,
  ...
)

## S3 method for class 'cdir'
metabias(
  x,
  comp.no,
  outcome.no,
  method.bias = "linreg",
  method.bias.binary = method.bias,
  method.bias.or = "score",
  k.min = 10,
  ...
)

Arguments

x	An object of class rm5 or cdir.
comp.no	Comparison number.
outcome.no	Outcome number.
method.bias	A character string indicating which test for small-study effects is to be used for all outcomes. Either "rank", "linreg", or "mm", can be abbreviated. See function metabias
method.bias.binary	A character string indicating which test is to be used for binary outcomes. Either "rank", "linreg", "mm", "count", "score", or "peters", can be abbreviated. See function metabias
method.bias.or	A character string indicating which test is to be used for binary outcomes with odds ratio as summary measure. Either "rank", "linreg", "mm", "count", "score", or "peters", can be abbreviated. See function metabias
k.min	Minimum number of studies to perform test for small-study effects.
...	Additional arguments (ignored at the moment)

Details

This function can be used to conduct a test for funnel plot asymmetry for all or selected meta-analyses in a Cochrane review of intervention studies (Higgins et al, 2023).

The R function metacr is called internally.

Author(s)

Guido Schwarzer [e-mail]

References

Higgins JPT, Thomas J, Chandler J, Cumpston M, Li T, Page MJ, Welch VA (editors) (2023): Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions Version 6.4 (updated August 2023). Available from https://www.cochrane.org/authors/handbooks-and-manuals/handbook

See Also

metabias, metacr, read.rm5, read.cdir, summary.rm5, summary.cdir

Examples

# Locate export data file "Fleiss1993_CR.csv" in sub-directory of
# package "meta"
#
filename <- system.file("extdata", "Fleiss1993_CR.csv", package = "meta")
Fleiss1993_CR <- read.rm5(filename)

# Print results for all tests of small-study effects
#
metabias(Fleiss1993_CR, k.min = 5)

# Print result of test of small-study effects for second outcome in
# first comparison
#
metabias(Fleiss1993_CR, comp.no = 1, outcome.no = 2, k.min = 5)

meta documentation built on Sept. 1, 2025, 5:09 p.m.