Meta-Analysis: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Appendix A

A brief introduction to R, OpenMx, and metaSEM packages

This appendix provides a short introduction to the R statistical environment (R Development Core Team, 2014), the OpenMx package (Boker et al., 2011), and the metaSEM package (Cheung, 2014). R is a statistical environment for data manipulation, calculations, and graphical display. It provides a complete system for statistical analyses and statistical programming. Many state-of-the-art statistical techniques have been implemented in R via packages. Readers can easily download and apply these techniques. If you are not familiar with R, you may get it started by reading some books in R, for example, Adler 2010, Dalgaard 2008, and Zuur et al. 2009. There is an updated list of books in R available at http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html. Moreover, there are also lots of free resources available to learning R in the R Web site. Readers are strongly recommended to go through at least An Introduction to R which is available at http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-intro.html. This appendix is based on R (3.1.1), metafor (1.9-3), OpenMx (2.0.0-3654), and metaSEM (0.9-0). The output format may be slightly different from the version that you are using. The Web sites for the software are

1. R: http://www.r-project.org/;
2. OpenMx: http://openmx.psyc.virginia.edu/; and
3. metaSEM: http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/psycwlm/Internet/metaSEM/.

A.1 R

R can be used interactively or noninteractively in batch mode. ...