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. 2015 Jan 5:5:1521.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01521. eCollection 2014.

metaSEM: an R package for meta-analysis using structural equation modeling

Affiliations

metaSEM: an R package for meta-analysis using structural equation modeling

Mike W-L Cheung. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

The metaSEM package provides functions to conduct univariate, multivariate, and three-level meta-analyses using a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach via the OpenMx package in the R statistical platform. It also implements the two-stage SEM approach to conducting fixed- and random-effects meta-analytic SEM on correlation or covariance matrices. This paper briefly outlines the theories and their implementations. It provides a summary on how meta-analyses can be formulated as structural equation models. The paper closes with a conclusion on several relevant topics to this SEM-based meta-analysis. Several examples are used to illustrate the procedures in the supplementary material.

Keywords: R; meta-analysis; meta-analytic structural equation modeling; metaSEM; structural equation modeling.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Univariate fixed-effects meta-analysis.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Univariate random-effects meta-analysis.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Univariate mixed-effects meta-analysis with one predictor.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Multivariate mixed-effects meta-analysis with two effect sizes per study and one predictor.

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