Meta-Analysis of Medians.

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.