Is cranberry juice an effective treatment for urinary tract infections?
Search Thought Process: First I’ll begin by using the EBM Reviews – Full Text through OVID. By using this database I’ll only be searching evidence-based materials from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the ACP Journal Club, and the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE). These sources are useful because they provide evidence that has already been synthesized. When I perform my search I’ll use and combine the keywords: urinary tract infection$, uti, cranberry juice$, cranberry$, and Vaccinium macrocarpon (the scientific name for cranberries). My search box will look something like this: (urinary tract infection$ OR uti$) AND (cranberry juice$ OR cranberr$ OR vaccinium macrocarpon) (Please note that in this database it is necessary to include as many synonyms of your terms as possible because you can’t use Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). One way to ensure you’re getting all of the pertinent results is to use truncation, which is enabled by adding $ to the stem of
