Where can I find an authoritative (peer-reviewed or textbook) reference to sampling-induced beating?
I think you are mixing two things that are actually not related. "Beating" happens if you add two sine waves that are close in frequency. What you describe is sampling sine wave close to the Nyquist Frequeny. If you plot the samples, it looks like there is beating going on, but that's not actually the case. All information is properly preserved and if you were to properly reconstruct the analog signal you would see a perfectly good sine wave with no beats at all.

The somewhat tricky issue here is "proper" reconstruction. Since your signal is very close to the Nyquist frequency you need a very steep anti-aliasing filter. 

Here is a code example of how to reconstruct the sine wave with no beats. Any residual beating is simply an artifact of an insufficient anti-aliasing or interpolation filter.

%% create a 60 Hz sine wave sampled at 128 Hz
fs = 128;
n = 256;
x = sin(2*pi*(0:n-1)'*60/fs);
figure(1); clf;
plot(x); 
% this looks like beating but it isn't

% let's upsampe to 32kHz so we can actually listen to it. We need a very
% steep anti-aliasing filter, so we go with a 64 tab Kaiser Window and a
% beta of 15
y = resample(x,250,1,64,15);
% plot a few periods from the steady state portion
figure(2); clf;
plot(y(10000:20000,:));
% looks like a perfectly good sine wave
sound(.9*y, 32000);
% sounds like one too.