Very few academics seem to be looking into web frameworks per sé. Hence the list provided here is specifically a collection of academic papers on web frameworks. There is, however an active academic community (mostly from the model-driven development camp) discussing ways of modelling web applications. If you are interested in the others and feel they should be listed also, go ahead and do so.
The list provided here focusses exclusively on papers that target web frameworks. Some articles on the present list are not very academic (academics are picky about which journals they consider academic 
), but these articles have been included anyway since the list is so short.
Published works on web frameworks
Copeland, D., Corbo, R., Falkenthal, S., Fisher, J., and Sandler, M. 2000. Which web development tool is right for you? IT Professional 2, 2 (March/April), 2027.
Crespo, A., Chang, B.-W., and Bier, E. A. 1997. Responsive interaction for a large web application: the meteor shower architecture in the webwriter ii editor. In Selected papers from the sixth international conference on World Wide Web. Elsevier Science Publishers Ltd., Essex, UK, 15071517.
- Draheim, D. and Weber, G. 2002. An overview of state-of-the-art architectures for active web sites. Tech. rep., Institute of Computer Science, Free University Berlin. Technical Report No B 02-07.
Fraternali, P. 1999. Tools and Approaches for Developing Data-Intensive Web Applications: A Survey. ACM Computing Surveys, 31, 3 (September), 227-263.
Helman, T. and Fertalj, K. 2003. A critique of web application generators. In Proceeding of the 25th International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces (ITI), 2003. ITI 2003. 639644.
Rode, J., Rosson, M. B., and Perez-Quinones, M. A. 2004. End-users mental models of concepts critical to web application development. In VLHCC '04: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages - Human Centric Computing (VLHCC'04). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 215222.
Vosloo, I. 2005. A web application user interface specifcation language based on statecharts. M.S. thesis, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. (http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-02072006-114551/unrestricted/00dissertation.pdf)
- Westkämper, T. 2004. Architectural models of J2EE web tier frameworks. M.S. thesis, University of Tampere.