[skissane]

What about writing (say) a masters or PhD thesis?

For many disciplines, the actual research involves field work, performing experiments, etc., and the thesis is primarily about reporting on that process and connecting it to the pre-existing body of research. For other disciplines (for example, philosophy), the text of the thesis is all there is to the research. Maybe the later is more like creative writing and the former more like technical writing??

(My uncle did a PhD in creative writing, his PhD thesis was a novel.)