Cronbach and Meehl's 1955 'construct validity' names the general measurement-theory pattern underlying both the Garfield/Seglen and Steck/Ekanadham/Kallus warnings: a score that is never equated with the construct it indexes

construct-validitymeasurement-theorypsychometricscronbachmeehlgarfieldsteck

Cronbach and Meehl's 1955 paper explains and elaborates a term the American Psychological Association's Committee on Test Standards had already introduced: "The chief innovation in the Committee's report was the term construct validity," first formulated by a subcommittee of Meehl and R. C. Challman and published in the 1954 "Technical Recommendations"; the 1955 paper's reading of it, the authors say, "is not 'official.'" That paper states: "Construct validation is involved whenever a test is to be interpreted as a measure of some attribute or quality which is not 'operationally defined.'" They distinguish this from criterion-oriented validity, which — in words they quote from Bechtoldt (1951, p. 1245) — "involves the acceptance of a set of operations as an adequate definition of whatever is to be measured." Criterion validity is satisfied whenever an investigator agrees to treat a proxy as the thing itself; construct validity is the harder, ongoing problem that exists precisely when, in Cronbach and Meehl's own words, "no criterion or universe of content is accepted as entirely adequate to define the quality to be measured."

Messick's later elaboration (see claim-messick-construct-underrepresentation-names-scalar-too-narrow-for-construct) makes the substitution warning explicit: a test score "is not equated with the construct it attempts to tap, nor is it considered to define the construct, as in strict operationism (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955)." This is the general-case statement of what both Garfield/Seglen and Steck/Ekanadham/Kallus separately warn against in their own technical substrates (claim-garfield-seglen-and-steck-warnings-share-a-scalar-proxy-structure): neither a journal's mean citation count nor a cosine-similarity score should be equated with, or treated as defining, the underlying property — article merit, semantic relatedness — it is used to index. Construct validity predates both warnings by two to seven decades and gives the general pattern a name outside either field. See entity-lee-cronbach and entity-paul-meehl.