3.6 Summarising the comparison

In summary:

It would be exhausting, fruitless and probably upsetting to list all of the papers that have used adonis2 (or adonis, its predecessor) in R to perform a PERMANOVA for a complex design that have failed to notice these important problems and limitations. No-one can really be blamed for trying to use adonis2. It seems (on the face of it) like it should work. It has been used to run all sorts of designs and gets cited rather a lot. Unfortunately, the results of analyses done using adonis2 might be wrong, and the inferences drawn misleading, depending on the model/study design.

In deference to the excellent people who wrote the adonis2 routine (it's clearly a good thing that they created it), I feel certain that they (probably) never intended for this function to be used to analyse complex experimental designs with random factors, nested factors, etc. It would be helpful for the truly limited scope of adonis2 to be more plainly acknowledged somewhere in the documentation and/or description of the routine, so that end-users are not mis-led. Perhaps a future R package will address some of these issues.

Importantly, the PERMANOVA routine in PRIMER allows the user:


Revision #33
Created 14 May 2024 03:18:21 by Marti
Updated 16 May 2024 02:44:34 by Marti