Basing primarily on the documents of the Tang dynasty, Popova has contributed into the study of the imperial rulership in medieval China and into the study of the interinfluence of the political practice and imperial ideology in pre-modern China; she has introduced into the academic use the original documents from Dunhuang and Turfan, Chinese epigraphic texts, visual sources on the history of Qing dynasty, archival material on the history of Russian expeditions in Central Asia and history of the Oriental studies