Lack of use in the literature from the last 20 years supports dropping traditional schizophrenia subtypes from DSM-5 and ICD-11.

The diagnoses of paranoia, catatonia, and hebephrenia preceded the use of dementia praecox and Bleuler's subsequent recognition of a heterogenous "Group of Schizophrenias." With some modification, traditional schizophrenia subtypes have been formalized for many years in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD) classification systems. While widely used in the past, it is not clear that the schizophrenia subtypes remain in wide use or are influential in 21st-century research and clinical practice, and especially in the scientific literature. A review of published articles reveals over the last 20 years (1990, 2000, 2010) the use of traditional subtypes in the literature has fallen from 27.7% to 9.8% to 6.5%. Thus, by 2010, the use of subtypes in the leading literature venues declined to <10%. These facts strongly support DSM-5 and ICD-11 proposed elimination of traditional schizophrenia subtypes from a research and evolving knowledge perspective because traditional subtypes are simply no longer being used much in the scientific literature.