Introduction to robvis, a visualisation tool for risk-of-bias assessments

2019-04-18

The robvis package takes the summary table from risk-of-bias assessments, converts it to tidy data, produces a summary plot (incorporating some measure of weighting for each study), and formats the plot by the tool used.

Users can currently produce summary plots for three commonly used tools: ROB2.0, ROBINS-I and QUADAS-2

Common structure of risk-of-bias assessment output (usually in Excel)

knitr::kable(data_rob)

Study	D1	D2	D3	D4	D5	Overall	Weight
Study 1	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low	33.3333333
Study 2	Some concerns	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low	33.3333333
Study 3	Some concerns	Low	Some concerns	Low	Low	Some concerns	0.1428571
Study 4	Low	Low	High	Low	Some concerns	High	9.0909091
Study 5	High	High	Low	Low	Some concerns	Low	12.5000000
Study 6	Low	High	Some concerns	Low	Low	Some concerns	25.0000000
Study 7	Low	Some concerns	Some concerns	High	Low	Some concerns	200.0000000
Study 8	Low	Some concerns	Low	Low	Low	Low	11.1111111
Study 9	Low	Low	High	Low	Low	High	1.1111111

RoB2.0 tool for randomised controlled trials

rob_summary(data_rob, tool = "ROB2")

ROBINS-I tool for non-randomised studies of interventions

rob_summary(data_robins, tool = "ROBINS-I")

QUADAS-2 for diagnostic test accuracy studies

rob_summary(data_quadas, tool = "QUADAS-2")