Jess: I can give you the standard references (which you’ve probably already seen), but they are mostly useless. This is a really weird field to work in, I’d strongly recommend against making a career of it. Tough to find jobs for rather stupid political reasons.
The only really useful work is a paper about measurement by David Bohm from the 50′s (don’t have it with me). He describes decoherence/measurement in words, and his explanation makes sense. It’s good to get an intuitive picture, but not for much else.
Apart from that, all I can suggest is that you build a toy model of a quantum system X observation device and solve it. That will explain far more than any paper I’ve ever read.
Sometime last year, I got involved in studying foundations of quantum mechanics. Like many people before me, I rediscovered decoherence. (In my case, the context was a heavy atom interacting with Bose-Einstein Condensate.)
After I discussed my work with one of our resident experts in the topic, he pointed out to me that David Bohm had made the same argument (in words, not mathematically) in the early 1950′s. In fact, the idea had even been present before that, though Bohm’s explanation is the best of the early ones. He postulated the following explanation why the Copenhagen interpretation became the dominant one: the Copenhagen crowd had more Ph.D. students, and network effects (Copenhagen people becoming editors at PRL, for instance) pushed a nonsensical theory into the mainstream.