Writing papers with deceased co-authors? I am doing a literature review for a project and I have come across recent papers in top journals where one of the co-authors is a famous Statistician (Peter G. Hall, 1951 – 2016). This is an example that motivated my question, but my question applies in general. Reviews in those journals usually take less than 2 years (in most cases, about a year). Thus, the papers where submitted a fair amount of time after the famous co-author passed away.
My question is, how do editors check (if at all) if the authors actually worked on those projects with the late famous co-author in order to (i) justify their inclusion, and (ii) determine if the inclusion of that co-author does not follow some sort of political move to increase the chances of getting a paper accepted.
This situation can happen, just like some professors have been caught putting the name of their son or their wife on their paper in the past.
Generally, the editor will not verify if authors really contributed to a paper because it would be hard to verify. Hence, journals adopts some simple mechanism such as requiring that authors disclose what are the contributions of each author at the time of submission, some journals will also send an e-mail to each author to notify them of the submission, some journals require authors to use official e-mail addresses, and some journals also require that authors sign a document when submiting.
Upon receiving a paper, some journals do a pre-screening where they check for plagiarism, if the paper is out of topic and other problems, before sending to reviewers. During that phase, if something is suspicious, the editor could try to investigate more. Or if the reviewers subsequently find something suspicious, they could also raise questions during the review process.
But generally, it is not easy to discover such cases unless it is quite obvious or some authors talk about what happened to the editor.
For the article that you mentioned, it is maybe correct because top journals sometimes not only have a long review time (1 or 2 years), but also have a backlog of papers to publish that can extend to 2 years in some cases. Maybe that the famous statistician has participated to an earlier draft. But in any case, it is hard to verify this.