Work in progress — ActiLab is a young project, built in the open. New tools and content show up regularly, sometimes at odd hours.

Statistics and meta-analysis

Free knowledge, free software, and courses for systematic reviews and meta-analysis.

Meta-analysis has a reputation for being intimidating — heterogeneity, forest plots, funnel plots, I² statistics, an alphabet soup of models. That reputation is, if we're honest, not entirely unearned: doing it right takes real statistical care, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What doesn't have to be true is the rest of it — that getting there requires an eye-watering license, a black box you're told to just trust.

ActiLab is built to be different: everything a researcher needs for meta-analysis, the gold standard for reliable quantitative synthesis across medicine, psychology, economics, education, ecology, and beyond — done properly, and free, with no business model behind it. It grew out of years spent caring about this stuff more than made sense, with no exit plan and no investors to keep happy. Just an insistence on doing it right, for its own sake.

Start with the free knowledge and free software; when you want to go deeper, the Academy offers structured courses (still being built, so no dates yet), built to teach the method properly rather than just how to click through a tool.

What you'll find here

• Meta-analysis — what a systematic review / meta-analysis is, glossary, and references. Start here if you are new to the topic.
• Software — free, open-source apps for meta-analysis.
• Data & Security — why your research data stays with you, not with ActiLab.
• Academy — courses on meta-analysis and systematic reviews, with a certificate of completion issued by ActiLab.

ActiLab's software is a free, open-source alternative to tools built to harvest researchers' data: everything runs in your browser and never gets shipped off to a server you'll never see, in a country you didn't pick, under terms nobody reads — see Data & Security for what that means in practice.

— Giacomo