In my quest to find a suitable alternative to CMA that even full-on unapologetic troglodytes like me can understand – let’s give it a test drive!ĭISCLAIMER: Most of the time I have no idea that I’m doing, as will be readily apparent to any expert after even a cursory glance.
However, I never found the time to take up the learning curve needed for R (i.e., I’m too stupid and lazy), and while recently whining on Twitter about how someone (most definitely not me) should make a graphical front-end for R that doesn’t pre-suppose advanced degrees in computer science, voodoo black arts and advanced nerdery Wolfgang Viechtbauer pointed me to JamoviMeta. On the whole, CMA is a bit cumbersome and expensive to work with, and I’ve been telling myself to go and learn R for years now if anything to use the Metafor package, which is widely regarded as excellent. Moreover, CMA has a number of very irritating bugs and glitches: just to name a few, there’s issues with copying and pasting data, issues with not outputting high-resolution graphics but just a black screen, issues with system locale, etc. Some years back, CMA changed from one-off purchases to an annual subscription plan, ranging from $195-$895 per year per user, obviously taking hints from other lucrative subscription-based plans (I’m looking at you, Office365). Downside of this relative ease of use is the unbridled proliferation of biased meta-analyses that serve only ‘prove’ something works, but let’s not get into that – my blood pressure is high enough as it is. CMA has brought the practice of meta-analysis (or ‘ an exercise in mega-silliness‘, as Eysenck called it) to a broader audience because of its relative ease of use.
Comprehensive meta analysis software software#
Red thread in this is the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (CMA) meta-analysis software package. I’ve done a few, two are under review, and two almost ready for submission.