Development and validation of MIX: comprehensive free software for meta-analysis of causal research data

By L. Bax, Ly-Mee Yu, N. Ikeda, H. Tsuruta, Karel G. M. Moons. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 2006

532 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundMeta-analysis has become a well-known method for synthesis of quantitative data from previously conducted research in applied health sciences. So far, meta-analysis has been particularly useful in evaluating and comparing therapies and in assessing causes of disease. Consequently, the number of software packages that can perform meta-analysis has increased over the years. Unfortunately, it can take a substantial amount of time to get acquainted with some of these programs and most contain little or no interactive educational material. We set out to create and validate an easy-to-use and comprehensive meta-analysis package that would be simple enough programming-wise to remain available as a free download. We specifically aimed at students and researchers who are new to meta-analysis, with important parts of the development oriented towards creating internal interactive tutoring tools and designing features that would facilitate usage of the software as a companion to existing books on meta-analysis.ResultsWe took an unconventional approach and created a program that uses Excel as a calculation and programming platform. The main programming language was Visual Basic, as implemented in Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic for Applications in Excel 2000 and higher. The development took approximately two years and resulted in the 'MIX' program, which can be downloaded from the program's website free of charge. Next, we set out to validate the MIX output with two major software packages as reference standards, namely STATA (metan, metabias, and metatrim) and Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Version 2. Eight meta-analyses that had been published in major journals were used as data sources. All numerical and graphical results from analyses with MIX were identical to their counterparts in STATA and CMA. The MIX program distinguishes itself from most other programs by the extensive graphical output, the click-and-go (Excel) interface, and the educational features.ConclusionThe MIX program is a valid tool for performing meta-analysis and may be particularly useful in educational environments. It can be downloaded free of charge via http://www.mix-for-meta-analysis.info or http://sourceforge.net/projects/meta-analysis.

Subfields: Oncology, Small Animals, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff164f54eaf8f8cf05887eb27064bc0c203c60f7

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In Oncology

W. Viechtbauer

In Small Animals

W. Viechtbauer

In Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

Salt intake, stroke, and cardiovascular disease: meta-analysis of prospective studies (2009, methodology): “All statistical analyses were performed with MIX software version 1.7”
Meta-analytic Reviews in the Organizational Sciences: Two Meta-analytic Schools on the Way to MARS (the Meta-analytic Reporting Standards) (2013, background): “A recent review suggested that two programs, Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (Borenstein et al. 2005) and MIX (Bax et al. 2006), are easy to use and offer many different capabilities for the analysis as well as the graphical presentation of results (Bax et al. 2007).”
Closing the Gap between Methodologists and End-Users: R as a Computational Back-End (2012, methodology): “Currently, meta-analysis methods are implemented in many statistical packages, including Stata (Sterne 2009), SPSS (Lipsey and Wilson 2001), SAS (Arthur, Bennett, Huﬀcutt, Arthur, and Bennett 2001) and R (Schwarzer 2012; Lumley 2009; Viechtbauer 2010), in addition to Microsoft Excel plug-ins, such a”
Conducting Meta-Analyses in R with the metafor Package (2010, methodology): “MIX (Bax et al. 2006) and MetaEasy (Kontopantelis and Reeves 2009) are add-ins for Excel and meta-analysis functions/macros have been made available for Stata (StataCorp.”
Empirical Studies of Pair Programming for CS/SE Teaching in Higher Education: A Systematic Literature Review (2011, background): “7 [2], [3] for performing both meta-analyses and”
Sleep duration predicts cardiovascular outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies. (2011, background): “7.(15) The study adheres to the PRISMA Statement guidelines (Supplementary material online, Appendix S2).”