Prior to Edwards developing his equation, other scientists were also working to define nucleophilicity quantitatively. Brønsted and Pederson first discovered the relationship between basicity, with respect to protons, and nucleophilicity in 1924:
:where 
where k is the rate constant for nitramide decomposition by a base (B) and β is a parameter of the equation.
Swain and Scott later tried to define a more specific and quantitative relationship by correlating nucleophilic data with a single-parameter equation derived in 1953:
This equation relates the rate constant k, of a reaction, normalized to that of a standard reaction with water as the nucleophile (k), to a nucleophilic constant n for a given nucleophile and a substrate constant s that depends on the sensitivity of a substrate to nucleophilic attack (defined as 1 for methyl bromide). This equation was modeled after the Hammett equation.
However, both the Swain–Scott equation and the Brønsted relationship make the rather inaccurate assumption that all nucleophiles have the same reactivity with respect to a specific reaction site. There are several different categories of nucleophiles with different attacking atoms (e.g. oxygen, carbon, nitrogen) and each of these atoms has different nucleophilic characteristics. The Edwards equation attempts to account for this additional parameter by introducing a polarizability term.