MetaWin

MetaWin is free, open source, multi-platform software for conducting the quantitative meta-analysis portion of research synthesis. It has been rewritten from scratch relative to earlier versions. The new version is written entirely in Python, and the code is available on Github. Single file executable versions of the software for Windows and Mac operating systems can be downloaded from this site.

The manuscript associated with the current version of MetaWin is

Rosenberg, M.S. (2024) MetaWin 3: Open-source software for meta-analysis Frontiers in Bioinformatics 4:1305969. DOI: 10.3389/fbinf.2024.1305969

A Brief History

MetaWin (Rosenberg et al. 1997) was first published as a small, commercial piece of software that made meta-analytical calculations more accessible to the burgeoning research synthesis community, particularly in the ecological sciences, and helped introduce the use of resampling methods into the meta-analytic statistical repertoire (Adams et al. 1997).

Version 2 of the software (Rosenberg et al. 2000) was substantially expanded over the original version, easier to use, and more flexible and powerful.

The original versions of MetaWin were written in Pascal and Delphi and depended on a number of commercially licensed packages. These developmental environments combined to functionally restrict the software to the Windows operating system and prevented any practial open source release as the software was otherwise uncompilable without these components. These also restricted further development and updates as the developmental components and systems gradually became incompatible with newer operating systems.

Despite these limitations, MetaWin 2 continued to be regularly used and cited decades after its original release.

Primary Features