%ARunco, Jordan%AShapley, Alice%ASanders, Ryan%AKriek, Mariska%AReddy, Naveen%ACoil, Alison%AMobasher, Bahram%ASiana, Brian%ATopping, Michael%AFreeman, William%AShivaei, Irene%AAzadi, Mojegan%APrice, Sedona%ALeung, Gene%AFetherolf, Tara%Ade Groot, Laura%AZick, Tom%AFornasini, Francesca%ABarro, Guillermo%BJournal Name: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; Journal Volume: 517; Journal Issue: 3 %D2022%I %JJournal Name: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; Journal Volume: 517; Journal Issue: 3 %K %MOSTI ID: 10336846 %PMedium: X %TThe MOSDEF survey: towards a complete census of the z ∼ 2.3 star-forming galaxy population %XABSTRACT We analyse the completeness of the MOSDEF survey, in which z ∼ 2 galaxies were selected for rest-optical spectroscopy from well-studied HST extragalactic legacy fields down to a fixed rest-optical magnitude limit (HAB = 24.5). The subset of z ∼ 2 MOSDEF galaxies with high signal-to-noise (S/N) emission-line detections analysed in previous work represents a small minority (<10 per cent) of possible z ∼ 2 MOSDEF targets. It is therefore crucial to understand how representative this high S/N subsample is, while also more fully exploiting the MOSDEF spectroscopic sample. Using spectral-energy distribution (SED) models and rest-optical spectral stacking, we compare the MOSDEF z ∼ 2 high S/N subsample with the full MOSDEF sample of z ∼ 2 star-forming galaxies with redshifts, the latter representing an increase in sample size of more than a factor of three. We find that both samples have similar emission-line properties, in particular in terms of the magnitude of the offset from the local star-forming sequence on the [N ii] BPT diagram. There are small differences in median host galaxy properties, including the stellar mass (M*), star formation rate (SFR) and specific SFR (sSFR), and UVJ colours; however, these offsets are minor considering the wide spread of the distributions. Using SED modelling, we also demonstrate that the sample of z ∼ 2 star-forming galaxies observed by the MOSDEF survey is representative of the parent catalog of available such targets. We conclude that previous MOSDEF results on the evolution of star-forming galaxy emission-line properties were unbiased relative to the parent z ∼ 2 galaxy population. %0Journal Article