MetaWin 3: open-source software for meta-analysis

Abstract

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The rise of research synthesis and systematic reviews over the last 25 years has been aided by a series of software packages providing simple and accessible GUI interfaces which are intuitively easy to use by novice analysts and users. Development of many of these packages has been abandoned over time due to a variety of factors, leaving a gap in the software infrastructure available for meta-analysis. To fulfill the continued demand for a GUI-based meta-analytic system, we have now released MetaWin 3 as free, open-source, multi-platform software. MetaWin3 is written in Python and developed from scratch relative to earlier versions. The codebase is available on Github, with pre-compiled executables for both Windows and macOS available from the MetaWin website. MetaWin includes standardized effect size calculations, exploratory and publication bias analyses, and allows for both simple and complex explanatory models of variation within a meta-analytic framework, including meta-regression, using traditional least-squares/moments estimation.

Keywords

• effect sizes
• meta-analysis
• meta-regression
• research synthesis
• software