Definition of "representativeness"

One should not compromise on the essential standard of representativeness of the corpus as a whole. A corpus is only good if it can be reasonably trusted to represent the way language is used by those people whose usage one is interested in describing.

2001, Sydney I. Landau, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, Cambridge University Press, page 331

Drawing on texts recommended in curricula and controlling for two countries with benchmarked curricula improves the external representativeness of the corpus.

2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects”, in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 35, page 108