What recent research looks at how scientific theories are established?
While it is not terribly much more recent than Kuhn, I highly recommend reading "Laboratory Life" by Latour and Woolgar, published in 1979.  This book attempts to take both an anthropological and a quantitative approach to the question of how scientific theories are established, and was produced following field-work where one of the authors worked as a technician in a major biological laboratory.

Whereas many philosophers of science such as Kuhn and Popper approach science from a very high-level view, this book instead asks the question of what it is that scientists actually do all day, and why.  It views progress in science in terms of micro-scale arguments about the soundness of assertions, and presents several case studies of investigations and investigators, quantifying them with bibliometrics.

I will warn that the presentation includes a heavy dash of post-modernist thought and language that will turn some people off from the work.  Personally, I find it to not be particularly problematic---just take certain assertions with a grain of salt, just as you would any other investigative work.