ABSTRACT
The R Statistical Programming Language and Environment has become one of the most powerful and frequently used statistical programming languages in the world. Much of R's capabilities stem from freely available add-ons that people all around the world have developed; so-called packages. Furthermore, there are free computer programs which have made it much more convenient to use R for statistical analyses.
In this chapter, a brief introduction into the R “ecosystem” is provided, including a step-by-step guide on how one can set up R on a personal computer. The fundamental building blocks of the R language are discussed: packages, functions and data types.
In several hands-on examples, the chapter also covers ways to import, manipulate and save data using R, with a focus on operations that are frequently needed for meta-analyses.
