metaCOVID: An R-Shiny application for living meta-analyses of COVID-19 trials

“Living” evidence synthesis is of primary interest for decision-makers to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-NMA provides open-access living meta-analyses assessing different therapeutic and preventive interventions. Data are posted on a platform ( <ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://covid-nma.com/">https://covid-nma.com/</ext-link> ) and analyses are updated every week. However, guideline developers and other stakeholders also need to investigate the data and perform their own analyses. This requires resources, time, statistical expertise, and software knowledge. To assist them, we created the “ metaCOVID” application which, based on automation processes, facilitates the fast exploration of the data and the conduct of analyses tailored to end-users needs. metaCOVID has been created in R and is freely available as an R-Shiny application. The application conducts living meta-analyses for every outcome. Several options are available for subgroup and sensitivity analyses. The results are presented in downloadable forest plots. metaCOVID is freely available from <ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://covid-nma.com/metacovid/">https://covid-nma.com/metacovid/</ext-link> and the source code from <ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://github.com/TEvrenoglou/metaCovid">https://github.com/TEvrenoglou/metaCovid</ext-link> .