Zaliznyak's first monograph, Russian Nominal Inflection (1967), remains a definitive study in the field.

As the number of these ancient documents exceeded 700, Zaliznyak summed up his findings in the monograph Old Novgorod dialect (1995), which comprised the texts and comments of every birch scroll discovered.

In 2003, Zaliznyak published the first comprehensive study of the Novgorod Codex, the earliest extant East Slavic book, which had been sensationally discovered three years earlier.

In 2004, he published a study of The Tale of Igor's Campaign which examined all the significant linguistic arguments concerning its authenticity.

Zaliznyak contends that no 20th-century (let alone 18th-century) forger could have reproduced the grammatical subtleties of the 12th-century Old East Slavic language.