Meta-analysis for psychiatric research using free software R

SUMMARY This paper provides a brief overview of meta-analysis (MA) with emphasis on classical fixedeffects and random-effects MA models. It illustrates the application of MA models with the open-source software R using publicly available data from five studies on lamotrigine to treat bipolar depression and finds that meta-analysis identifies a statistically significant advantage of lamotrigine over placebo that was not evident in the individual studies.