Changes in Version 1.5-0 (2010-12-15; released on CRAN)

   o the metafor package now has its own project website 
     at http://www.metafor-project.org/

   o added labbe() function to create LAbbe plots

   o the forest.default() and addpoly.default() functions
     now allow the user to directly specify the lower and 
     upper confidence interval bounds (this can be useful
     when the CI bounds have been calculated with other
     methods/functions)

   o added the incidence rate for a single group and for two
     groups (and transformations thereof) as possible outcome 
     measures to the escalc() and rma.uni() functions

   o added the incidence rate ratio as a possible outcome
     measure to the rma.mh() function

   o added transformation functions related to incidence 
     rates

   o added the Freeman-Tukey double arcsine transformation
     and its inverse to the transformation functions

   o added some additional error checking for out-of-range
     p-values in the permutest.rma.uni() function

   o added some additional checking for out-of-range values
     in several transformation functions

   o added confint() methods for rma.mh and rma.peto objects
     (only for completeness sake; print already provides CIs)

   o added new datasets (dat.warfarin, dat.los, dat.empint)

   o some improvements to the documentation


Changes in Version 1.4-0 (2010-07-30; released on CRAN)

   o the package has now been published in the Journal of 
     Statistical Software (http://www.jstatsoft.org/v36/i03/)

   o added citation info; see: citation("metafor")

   o metafor package now depends on nlme package

   o added extractor functions for the AIC, BIC, and deviance

   o some updates to the documentation


Changes in Version 1.3-0 (2010-06-25; released on CRAN)

   o metafor package now depends on Formula package

   o made escalc() generic and implemented a default and a
     formula interface

   o added the (inverse) arcsine transformation to the set of
     transformation functions


Changes in Version 1.2-0 (2010-05-18)

   o cases where k is very small (e.g., k equal to 1 or 2) are 
     now handled more gracefully

   o added sanity check for cases where all observed outcomes
     are equal to each other (this led to division by zero when
     using the Knapp & Hartung method)

   o the "smarter way to set the number of iterations for 
     permutation tests" (see notes for previous version below) 
     now actually works like it is supposed to

   o the permutest.rma.uni() function now provides more sensible
     results when k is very small; the documentation for the 
     function has also been updated with some notes about the 
     use of permutations tests under those circumstances

   o made some general improvements to the various forest plot 
     functions making them more flexible in particular when 
     creating more complex displays; most importantly, added a 
     rows argument and removed the addrows argument

   o some additional examples have been added to the help files 
     for the forest and addpoly functions to demonstrate how to
     create more complex displays with these functions

   o added showweight argument to the forest.default() and 
     forest.rma() functions

   o cumul() functions not showing all of the output columns
     when using fixed-effects models has been corrected

   o weights.rma.uni() function now handles NAs appropriately

   o weights.rma.mh() and weights.rma.peto() functions added

   o logLik.rma() function now behaves more like other logLik() 
     functions (such as logLik.lm() and logLik.lme())


Changes in Version 1.1-0 (2010-04-28; released on CRAN)

   o cint() generic removed and replaced with confint() method
     for rma.uni objects

   o slightly improved the code to set the x axis title in the
     forest() and funnel() functions

   o added coef() method for objects of class permutest.rma.uni

   o added append argument to escalc() function

   o implemented a smarter way to set the number of iterations
     for permutation tests (i.e., the permutest.rma.uni() function 
     will now switch to an exact test if the number of iterations 
     required for an exact test is actually smaller than the 
     requested number of iterations for an approximate test)

   o changed the way how p-values for individual coefficients are 
     calculated in permutest.rma.uni() to 'two times the one-tailed 
     area under the permutation distribution' (more consistent 
     with the way we typically define two-tailed p-values)

   o added retpermdist argument to permutest.rma.uni() to
     return the permutation distributions of the test statistics

   o slight improvements to the various transformation functions to 
     cope better with some extreme cases

   o p-values are now calculated in such a way that very small 
     p-values stored in fitted model objects are no longer 
     truncated to 0 (the printed results are still truncated 
     depending on the number of digits specified)

   o changed the default number of iterations for the ML, REML, 
     and EB estimators from 50 to 100


Changes in Version 1.0-1 (2010-01-28; released on CRAN)

   o version jump in conjunction with the upcoming publication 
     of a paper in the Journal of Statistical Software describing 
     the package

   o instead of specifying a design matrix, the user can
     now specify a model formula for the mods argument in the
     rma() function (e.g., like in the lm() function)

   o permutest() function now allows exact permutation tests
     (but this is only feasible when k is not too large)

   o forest() function now uses the level argument properly to
     adjust the CI level of the summary estimate for models
     without moderators (i.e., fixed- and random-effets models)

   o forest() function can now also show the credibility interval
     as a dashed line for a random-effects model

   o information about the measure used is now passed on to
     the forest() and funnel() functions, which try to set an
     appropriate x axis title accordingly

   o funnel() function now has more arguments (e.g., atransf, at)
     providing more control over the display of the x axis

   o predict() function now has its own print method and has a
     new argument (addx), which adds the values of the moderator
     variables to the returned object (when addx=TRUE)

   o functions now properly handle the na.action "na.pass"
     (treated essentially like "na.exclude")

   o added method for weights() function to extract the weights
     used when fitting models with rma.uni()

   o some small improvements to the documentation


Changes in Version 0.5-7 (2009-12-06; released on CRAN)

   o added permutest() function for permutation tests

   o added metafor.news() function to display the NEWS file
     of the metafor package within R (based on the same idea
     in the animate package by Yihui Xie)

   o added some checks for values below machine precision

   o a bit of code reorganization (nothing that affects how
     the functions work)


Changes in Version 0.5-6 (2009-10-19)

   o small changes to the computation of the DFFITS and DFBETAS
     values in the influence() function, so that these statistics
     are more in line with their definitions in regular linear
     regression models

   o added option to the plot function for objects returned by
     influence() to allow plotting the covariance ratios on a
     log scale (now the default)

   o slight adjustments to various print() functions (to catch
     some errors when certain values were NA)

   o added a control option to rma() to adjust the step length of
     the Fisher scoring algorithm by a constant factor (this may
     be useful when the algorithm does not converge)


Changes in Version 0.5-5 (2009-10-08; released on CRAN)

   o added the phi coefficient (measure="PHI"), Yule's Q ("YUQ"),
     and Yule's Y ("YUY") as additional measures to the escalc()
     function for 2x2 table data

   o forest plots now order the studies so that the first study
     is at the top of the plot and the last study at the bottom
     (the order can still be set with the order or subset argument)

   o added cumul() function for cumulative meta-analyses (with a
     corresponding forest() method to plot the cumulative results)

   o added leave1out() function for leave-one-out diagnostics

   o added option to qqnorm.rma.uni() so that the user can choose
     whether to apply the Bonferroni correction to the bounds of
     the pseudo confidence envelope

   o some internal changes to the class and methods names

   o some small corrections to the documentation


Changes in Version 0.5-4 (2009-09-18; released on CRAN)

   o corrected the trimfill() function

   o improvements to various print functions

   o added a regtest() function for various regression tests of
     funnel plot asymmetry (e.g., Egger's regression test)

   o made ranktest() generic and added a method for objects of
     class "rma" so that the test can be carried out after fitting

   o added anova() function for full vs reduced model comparisons
     via fit statistics and likelihood ratio tests

   o added the Orwin and Rosenberg approaches to fsn()

   o added H^2 measure to the output for random-effects models

   o in escalc(), measure="COR" is now used for the (usual) raw
     correlation coefficient and measure="UCOR" for the bias
     corrected correlation coefficients

   o some small corrections to the documentation


Changes in Version 0.5-3 (2009-07-31; released on CRAN)

   o small changes to some of the examples

   o added the log transformed proportion (measure="PLN") as another
     measure to the escalc() function; changed "PL" to "PLO" for the
     logit (i.e., log odds) transformation for proportions


Changes in Version 0.5-2 (2009-07-06)

   o added an option in plot.infl.rma.uni() to open a new device
     for plotting the DFBETAS values

   o thanks to Jim Lemon, added a much better method of adjusting
     the size of the labels, annotations, and symbols in the forest()
     function when the number of studies is large


Changes in Version 0.5-1 (2009-06-14)

   o made some small changes to the documentation (some typos
     corrected, some confusing points clarified)


First version released on CRAN: 0.5-0 (2009-06-05)
