In general, acidity of donor sites correlates well with the strength of the donor. For example, it is a common strategy to add electron-withdrawing aryl substituents on a thiourea catalyst, which can increase its acidity and thus the strength of its hydrogen bonding. However, it is still unclear how donor strength correlates with desired reactivity. Importantly, more acidic catalysts are not necessarily more effective. For instance, ureas are less acidic than thioureas by roughly 6 pKa units, but it is not generally true that ureas are significantly worse are catalyzing reactions.
Furthermore, the effect of varying substituents on the catalyst is rarely well understood. Small substituent changes can completely change reactivity or selectivity. An example of this was in the optimization studies of a bifunctional Strecker reaction catalyst, one of the first well-studied thiourea catalysts. Specifically, varying the X substituent on the salicylaldimine substituent, it was found that typical electron-withdrawing or electron-donating substituents had little effect on the rate, but ester substituents such as acetate or pivaloate seemed to cause noticeable rate acceleration. This observation is difficult to rationalize given that the X group is far from the reactive center during the course of the reaction and electronics do not seem to be the cause. In general, despite the relative ease of electronic tuning with organic catalysts, chemists have not yet reached a useful understanding of these modifications.