Create user with author role but no login information

I have a WordPress blog that has search functionality for authors, you can search an author name and that authors posts will come up.

I have editors of the blog, these people update the blog and manage all of the posts. However the posts that the editors are updating are not written by them, they are written by various other authors that have no need for accounts on my system. These authors do still need credit for there posts though.

This is where I am stuck, I basically want userless authors. This means they can appear as a user on the backend but they have no email linked to there user and no username or password just display name and first/last name. All that is needed to pull up search results for them when people search my blog filtering for authors.

I haven’t found any plugin or resource that can solve this problem. I wouldn’t mind building my own quick plugin to solve this problem but I don’t really know where to start as all of the WordPress user creation functions require some sort of login info.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

In a plugin, you can create the users with whatever information you want them to have (First name, last name, etc). The only required user fields are username, email and password, which you can specify.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_create_user

As Ahmed Mahdi stated above, you can create the users but not send them the login information.