This paper summarizes significant progress in quantifying organic substituent effects in the last 20 years. The main content is as follows: (1) The principle of electronegativity equalization has gained wide acceptance, and has been used to calculate the intramolecular charge distribution and inductive effect of groups. A valence electrons equalization method was proposed to compute the molecular electronegativity on the basis of geometric mean method, harmonic mean method, and weighted mean method. This new calculation method further extended the application of the principle of electronegativity equalization. (2) A scale method was established for experimentally determining the electrophilic and nucleophilic ability of reagents, in which benzhydryliumions and quinone methides were taken as the reference compounds, and the research field was extended to the gas phase conditions, organometallic reaction and radicals system. Moreover, the nucleophilicity parameters N and electrophilicity parameters E for a series of reagents were obtained. The definition and quantitative expression of electrophilicity index and nucleophilicity index were proposed theoretically, and the correlation between the parameters from experimental determination and the indexes from theoretical calculation was also investigated. (3) The polarizability effect parameter was initially calculated by empirical method and further developed by quantum chemistry method. Recently, the polarizability effect index of alkyl (PEI) and groups (PEI X ) were proposed by statistical method, and got wide applications in explaining and estimating gas-phase acidity and basicity, ionization energy, enthalpy of formation, bond energy, reaction rate, water solubility and chromatographic retention for organic compounds. (4) The excited-state substituent constant ex CC obtained directly from the UV absorption energy data of substituted benzenes, is different from the polar constants in molecular ground state and the radical spin-delocalization effects constants in mo
