The Open Meta-Analyst Window

This section introduces the main Open Meta-Analyst window. First, if you have not already opened the example data set amino.oma, you can do so as follows:

1. Select open in the File menu.
2. In the Open File dialog, double-click the sample_data directory.
3. Select the file amino.oma.
4. Click Open.

The figure below shows the data set displayed in a table in the main window.

The Data Table displays the raw data for the studies, along with the effect sizes and confidence intervals. In this example, which uses binary data, the raw data columns display the following counts for two treatments, labeled tx A and tx B:

• tx An - Number of events in the first treatment group
• tx AN - Number of subjects in the first treatment group
• tx Bn - Number of events in the second treatment group
• tx BN - Number of subjects in the second treatment group

The yellow columns, which are automatically calculated from the raw data, display the effect sizes and confidence intervals:

• OR - The effect size - For binary data, the odds ratio is displayed by default. You can change the metric by selecting metric from the Analysis menu.
• lower - The lower bound of the confidence interval
• upper - The upper bound of the confidence interval

Besides binary data, you can also use Open Meta-Analyst to perform analyses on continuous or diagnostic data. For these data types, different values are displayed in the raw data columns - see Data Sets for a description of the data types.

The next section shows how to perform a meta-analysis on this data set.

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Starting Open Meta-Analyst

Example - Binary Data