Forest Plots

In meta-analysis, one of the most common tasks is making a forest plot. Many packages in R and Stata have their own abilities to make a forest plot, but here we present some options for making a forest plot in R or Stata, using the kind of results you might get as output from another package.

Three workflows are demonstrated here:

• metadata.xlsx is the original approach, building a forest plot by hand.
• forest-plot.Rmd–along with forest-plot.pdf and forest-plot.html–represent an attempt to automate the workflow in R.
• forest-plot.do is an attempt to automate the workflow in Stata, since Stata has the best suite of meta-analytic packages.