Follow

Keep Up to Date with the Most Important News

By pressing the Subscribe button, you confirm that you have read and are agreeing to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Contact

Changing "." to "-" in the summary column of a forest plot

I am trying to adjust my forest plot according to a journals guidelines. One of them is changing all "." to "-", e.g. "0.43" to "0-45". Weird, I know. Is there a possibility to do that for the summary column of the forest plot (the most right hand side in this case, see the example code).
I feel like it should be fairly easy, but I still have not figured it out.

here is an example code:

library(metafor)
 
### copy BCG vaccine meta-analysis data into 'dat'
dat <- dat.bcg
 
### calculate log risk ratios and corresponding sampling variances (and use
### the 'slab' argument to store study labels as part of the data frame)
dat <- escalc(measure="RR", ai=tpos, bi=tneg, ci=cpos, di=cneg, data=dat,
              slab=paste(author, year, sep=", "))
 
### fit random-effects model
res <- rma(yi, vi, data=dat)
 
### forest plot with extra annotations
forest(res, atransf=exp, at=log(c(0.05, 0.25, 1, 4)), xlim=c(-16,6),
       ilab=cbind(tpos, tneg, cpos, cneg), ilab.lab=c("TB+","TB-","TB+","TB-"),
       ilab.xpos=c(-9.5,-8,-6,-4.5), cex=0.75, header="Author(s) and Year",
       mlab="", shade=TRUE)
text(c(-8.75,-5.25), res$k+3, c("Vaccinated", "Control"), cex=0.75, font=2)

MEDevel.com: Open-source for Healthcare and Education

Collecting and validating open-source software for healthcare, education, enterprise, development, medical imaging, medical records, and digital pathology.

Visit Medevel

>Solution :

The decimal symbol can be controlled (globally within R) via options() — see help(options) and in particular OutDec. So just use options(OutDec="-") before creating the plot. I am not going to comment on the fact that using a dash as a decimal symbol is weird (and confusing) as hell.

Add a comment

Leave a Reply

Keep Up to Date with the Most Important News

By pressing the Subscribe button, you confirm that you have read and are agreeing to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use

Discover more from Dev solutions

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading