[R-meta] Importing Correlations from PDF to table format

Mon, Feb 28, 2022 11:04 AM

Hi Kiet,

The rcalc() function from metafor could be used for this. It even computes the var-cov matrix of the elements in the correlation matrix for you:

library(metafor)
R <- matrix(c(1, .3, .5, .3, 1, .6, .5, .4, 1), 3, 3)
R
rcalc(R, ni=50)

Best,
Wolfgang

-----Original Message-----
From: R-sig-meta-analysis [mailto:r-sig-meta-analysis-bounces at r-project.org] On
Behalf Of Kiet Huynh
Sent: Monday, 28 February, 2022 19:45
To: James Pustejovsky
Cc: R meta
Subject: Re: [R-meta] Importing Correlations from PDF to table format

Hi James,

Thank you for recommending these helpful packages. I was able to import the pdf
correlation table into a dataframe format in R. Are you aware of any R code that
could convert that correlation matrix dataframe into a meta-analysis type
dataframe (i.e., a column for variable 1, a column for variable 2, and a column
for correlation effect size)?

Best,

Kiet

On Feb 25, 2022, at 10:58 AM, James Pustejovsky <jepusto at gmail.com> wrote:

The pdftools package might be helpful:
https://github.com/ropensci/pdftools <https://github.com/ropensci/pdftools>
It has very low-level utilities for extracting text from pdf. You'd still have

to do some data clean-up to get the correlations into the form needed for
analysis.

The tabulizer package is meant to provide tools customized for working with pdf

tables:

https://github.com/ropensci/tabulizer <https://github.com/ropensci/tabulizer>
But it requires Java and it appears to be archived on CRAN. I'm not sure what

its development status is. Caveat emptor, I guess.

James

On Fri, Feb 25, 2022 at 12:20 PM Kiet Huynh <kietduchuynh at gmail.com

<mailto:kietduchuynh at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to automate in R (or any software) the

process of importing correlation values from PDF to usable data in a table format
that can be used in meta-analysis? My process has been to copy the correlations
manually one-by-one from the PDF to excel (which takes a lifetime!), and then
import the excel data into R. I'm sure there must be a better, faster, and less
error-prone way to do this.

Thank you,

Kiet

----

Kiet D. Huynh, Ph.D.
Pronouns: he/him
CLEAR Goldblum-Carr Postdoctoral Fellow
Palo Alto University
1791 Arastradero Rd.
Palo Alto, CA 94304

[R-meta] Importing Correlations from PDF to table format

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