Willie Nelson’s assurance that ‘Death is not the end of anything’ certainly applies to producing academic papers. Death is no impediment at all to the academic author. Richard Smith, sometime editor of the BMJ, writes of his own experience working with a deceased author:

One of the authors on the paper, the most distinguished of the several cardiologists, actually died before the study began. Yet that hasn’t stopped him being an author on a recently published letter that he cannot have read in response to another letter that he cannot have read about a paper that he cannot have read. (Smith, 2012)

While Smith’s author once had a life, the same cannot be said of Ike Antkare, who had 102 publications to his name and an h-index of 94 in April 2010, making him the world’s 21st most-cited scientist. There is no Ike Antkare and there never has been (Labbé, 2020), though he continues to publish (e.g., Antkare, 2020). A dog, a hamster, a parrot and chimpanzees have all been listed as academic authors (Penders and Shaw, 2020). Even Larry the Cat has 144 citations and an h-index of 12 (Richardson, 2024).