Biblical scholars tend to favor the NRSV translation, but then there are different sorts of annotated, concordanced, etc actual Bibles. What is the preferred or go-to edition of the Quran in English?
Assuming, of course, one has attempted to gain a background from secondary reading to properly contextualize a difficult source and its creation.
Correction: Biblical scholars tend to prefer the Greek and Hebrew. ;)
But seriously--the Oxford transation of the Quran seems to be pretty standard from what I know. I'm not an expert, though.
As /u/husky54 notes, the preference is decidedly for the Quran be recited or read in the original Arabic. It's a long running line of faith in Islam that the Qur'an cannot be translated. I don't think that's any more true of the Qur'an than of any other foreign language document but the point is that whereas the Arabic Qur'an is the revealed Word of God, the translation is not. God in Islam speaks Arabic. It's worth noting as well that significant aspects of the composition depend on the Qur'an actually being recited in Arabic. Surah Al-Jinn is my personal favorite example of this, though there are others, where what reads as somewhat boring in English is actually entirely in rhyme in Arabic.
As for translations, unfortunately there is no equivalent in Islamic studies of the Oxford Annotated Bible. The field is desperately in need of an academic annotated critical edition rather than having to continue fiddling (edit 2: forgot to finish my sentence here!) with five different books to get a good analysis of a given Surah (e.g. the translation of choice, some recent academic analysis of the Surah you're reading, the tafsir, Noldeke's analysis of dating, Richard Bell's analysis on ordering, scholars who disagree with Noldeke and Bell and on and on)
I personally very much like Pickthall. I would strongly warn you against a translation like Yusuf Ali or Sahih International which have a significant number of interpretative insertions from the Tafsir. The Tafsir is one kind of contextualization, but it's uncritical and doesn't belong in the text itself.
It's not in our reading list but I would strong encourage you to check out Neal Robinson's Discovering the Qur'an as part of your secondary reading.
edit: I almost forgot. I would add my support for the Leeds University Quran corpus project here: http://corpus.quran.com/wordbyword.jsp, as it promises you can see the individual analysis of each word of the Quran, and, for example, compare its usage in other places in the text. Quran.com is also a great free resource.
I'm not sure if it will meet /r/AskHistorians' standards, but quran.com offers all the "mainstream" translations: Sahih International, Pickthall, Yusuf Ali, etc.
The recent Oxford edition by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (2008) is increasingly preferred as a cheap, contemporary translation, with scholarly discussion and footnoting. It was highly recommended, for example, by the "Teaching the Islamic World" roundtable at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (2013). It would definitely be appropriate to cite for general scholarly use.
For a more specialized scholarly audience, the preferred translation would likely be by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1938, with later reprints). The translation is somewhat dated, and it has come under critique and been revised for various purposes, so it can by hard to know just what edition or text you're getting (a huge problem if you're working with just the English translation and not the Arabic itself). However, the extensive commentary with the facing Arabic for easy reference have made this the long-established preference for many scholars. I suspect that this will be the favorite for at least another generation of scholars.
Regarding context, I recommend Michael Sell's Approaching the Qur'an (1999), which gives a good sense of what the Arabic original does that no English translation can capture. I also think Gabriel Said Reynold's The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context (2008) is a necessary reference. The introduction is especially useful for understanding how the standard Arabic text was canonized by an Egyptian press in 1924, unfortunately submerging vibrant fields of text-critical manuscript studies by both Islamic and Orientalist (i.e. Arabic and European) scholars.