R: underscore letters in forest plot of meta-analysis using the metafor package

Question

This question was migrated from Cross Validated because it can be answered on Stack Overflow. Migrated 6 years ago.

Is there a way to present symbols (e.g. greek letters, symbols or underscore/upperscore letters) as labels in a forest plot of an rma() object generated by the forest() function of the metafor package?

Answer 1

Here is a nonsense example but it hopefully illustrates the underlying idea:

library(metafor)
data(dat.bcg)

labs <- paste(dat.bcg$author, dat.bcg$year)
## Replace the first label with a greek letter, a superscript and a subscript
labs[1] <- expression(beta[123]^123)

res <- rma(ai=tpos, bi=tneg, ci=cpos, di=cneg, data=dat.bcg, measure="RR", 
           method="REML")
forest(res, slab = labs)