Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors PhD thesis of Joe Armstrong, Erlang’s co-inventor, describing the origins of Erlang.

A History of Erlang by Joe Armstrong

Characterizing the Scalability of Erlang VM on Many-core Processors by Jianrong Zhang

On the Scalability of the Erlang Term Storage by David Klaftenegger, Konstantinos Sagonas, Kjell Winblad