Since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, Polish researchers in the software engineering area made a large effort to close the gap developed during the times of the Iron Curtain and the ensuing limited access to Western technology. The question arises as to whether they eventually managed to attain – or maybe even to surpass the scientific output in this area of the developed Western countries. In this paper, we perform analysis on papers published in 16 high-quality software engineering journals within the last 30 years to measure the Polish contribution to the global scientific output in the area of software engineering. We observe how the Polish contribution changed in quantity in relation to the global scientific output in subsequent years. We also identify the journals that attracted the Polish authors the most, the institutions located in Poland that contributed the most, as well as the most productive Polish authors and the most acknowledged works (in terms of citation number) written by Polish authors. Moreover, we investigate the topics most often chosen by them.