Objectives: Network meta-analysis (NMA), also known as mixed or indirect treatment comparisons, is a statistical method used to compare multiple treatments and their alternatives simultaneously, combining direct and indirect evidence in a single analysis. The rapid development of the open-source software R and its active community of developers makes it an ideal environment for keeping up with the latest methodological developments in NMA, far beyond the possibilities of Review Manager. At the end of the workshop, participants should be able to conceive the basic concept of NMA and to conduct a NMA using R.

Description: This workshop combines theory and exercises using R. A presentation introducing and illustrating concepts of NMA will be followed by a hands-on application where participants will work through a real-world NMA example using publicly available R packages.

This workshop will be based on the book 'Meta-Analysis with R' (Schwarzer et al., 2015). Participants should have their own laptop with a current installation of R (https://cran.r-project.org/), RStudio (https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/), and already installed R packages meta and netmeta.