Lipski, jointly with his PhD student, Tomasz Imieliński, created foundations of the theory of incomplete information in relational databases.

Jointly with his doctoral student, Tomasz Imieliński, Lipski investigated foundations of treatment of 'Incomplete Information in Relational Databases'.

According to Van den Bussche,[9] the first people from the database community to recognize the connection between Codd's relational algebra and Tarski's cylindric algebras were Witold Lipski and Tomasz Imieliński, in a talk given at the very first edition of PODS (the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems), in 1982.

[13] Lipski was an author of a book on combinatorial algorithms, Combinatorics for Programmers (Kombinatoryka dla Programistow, in Polish).

Starting in 2024, the Kosciuszko Foundation has handed over the role of organizing the award to the research and development center IDEAS NCBR [15] in Warsaw.