Version 4.5.1.0 contains major improvements in the Meta-Analytic functionalities, building on the infrastructure published on the previous release. Highlights include exporting your outcome data in a variety of formats for further reanalysis and support for moderator analysis / Meta-Regression. Other improvements include better layout on Forest-Plots, and some important bug fixes.

New Meta-analysis functionalities

New Feature: in “Edit/Run Meta-Analysis” window, it is now possible to set up Meta-Regressions, this is done via the "Show Moderators" button (main toolbar in the window). For the details, please see the manual for version 4.5.1 (will be published shortly), see also the complete documentation for the Metafor R package.

New Feature: in “Edit/Run Meta-Analysis” window, the outcomes data can now be exported in ready-to-use formats for data reanalysis. This is now the best way that EPPI-Reviewer offers to export numeric outcomes, along with "Outcomes(Answer)" reports and others. The powerful filtering abilities of the Outcomes table visible in this window can be exploited to select what outcomes to export in just a few clicks. Formats available are various Excel flavours, CSV and Word(docx).

Small changes/fixes:

Enhancement: the “Outcomes” table in “Edit/Run Meta-Analysis” allows to display (and filter/sort) data about the coding associated with Outcomes. This is done by adding “Question” and/or “Answer” columns to the table. Previously, this feature only worked for codes that belong to the same Code-Set as the corresponding Outcome. We have now expanded this feature, and any codes from any codetree can be used.

Enhancement: in “Edit/Run Meta-Analysis” window, running the R/Metafor-powered analysis now generates better Forest Plots: the height of the plot is picked dynamically depending on the number of studies included, the plot now includes the title (the meta analysis name) and column labels. Forest plots are also wider, producing better looking graphs.

Enhancement and Bugfix: in version 4.5.0.1 the "Meta-Analysis" (main) tab could take a long time to load the data, even in relatively small reviews. Furthermore when one or more Meta-Analyses contained one or more question columns (in the table showing the outcomes data), the list of Meta-Analyses in the Meta-analysis tab could fail to load and return a timeout error instead. In other cases, the list could fail to load and show an out of memory error instead. All these problems are solved and new, more efficient methods to fetch the data are in place.

BugFix: in "Add/Manage sources", "PubMed Import", we identified and corrected an issue in the PubMed search that could result in a mismatch between the number of items the search identified and the number of items imported into EPPI-Reviewer.

BugFix: also in "PubMed Import", results of Book type weren't imported correctly, the title wasn't being imported and the type was incorrectly set to "Journal Article"; this is now fixed.