There's loads of theory and anecdotal evidence behind why you should/shouldn't train using high reps, low reps, how many times a week etc, but has anyone got any links to actual studies on the effect of different rep ranges etc? ie. group A used 3x8 with 50% 1RM, group B used 5x5 with 70% 1RM, group C used 8x3 with 85% 1RM...blah blah....group A gained 2.3lbs of LBM after 8 weeks..etc that kinda stuff?
Any evidence that there is is usually biased, anecdotal, and experiments are badly controlled. Doctors are more concerned with things such as cancer to worry about strength trainers needs. On top of this, everyone truly is different. When you see programmes that are based on evidence use caution: they are probably trying to sell you something.
There are studies out there from reputable scources but they are medically related. So you would need to sift through all of them to find what you are looking for which is a labourious task. There is also no such thing as a condensed report with these things either so you would need mr Mcguigs education to understand what the hell they are on about anyway.
It's really not worth bothering about. As has already been said, most of them are crap especially if you don't want to read a bible every day. Check out Mel Siffs Supertraining, Zatsiorskys Science and Practice of Strength Training and Verkoshanskys material. They have tons of references in there if you are interested in the primary literature, but after a few pages of supertraining I suspect you will be thoroughly worn out
Bump on what Adam said about those texts. You might also pick up a copy of the NSCA's strength and conditioning text that has loads of studies done on various set/rep schemes. Typically what most of them say is this Group A did blah blah blah for X time and they all got stronger than they were before.
Sometimes the people used in the experiments for the control group, variable group, or both are people who have never trained in their life, and of course respond to the training stimulus. They don't select a proper control or variable group based on what they're trying to find. If they wanna see what range optimizes strength in athletes, use damned athletes, not grandma or joe schmoe in accounting who has never done a pushup in his life. Can you tell I hate experiments now?
You might want to try this site. They come up often in google scholar searches with study abstracts. http://www.ms-se.com
