This paper investigates how eight academic research supervisors working in a Faculty of Arts at a research-intensive Australian university understand the notion of creativity in doctoral writing; both in relation to what it is and where it is found. This question was investigated qualitatively through interviews focusing on reader reception to three, short doctoral texts. A framework of indexicality and orientation (Lillis, 2008) was then used to move beyond the text-level and focus on the contextual influences surrounding the writing as it was exposed to its critical readership. The findings reflect varying levels of awareness and receptivity to the presence of creativity in written doctoral work. The paper also explores the perceived location of creativity in these texts for academic readers; namely, whether it resides in the ideas (i.e., the creative thought/content) or whether it was more textually-based (i.e., the creative expression/form of the idea).

本文调查了在研究型澳大利亚大学的艺术学院工作的八名学术研究主管如何理解博士论文写作中的创造力的概念；无论是关于它是什么，在哪里都可以找到它。通过针对读者对三篇简短博士论文的采访进行定性调查，对该问题进行了定性研究。然后，使用了索引性和方向性框架（Lillis，2008），超越了文本层次，并专注于围绕着关键读者群而著述的周围环境的影响。这些发现反映了书面博士工作中对创造力存在的认识和接受程度的不同。本文还为学术读者探索了这些文本中创造力的感知位置；也就是说，它是否存在于思想中（即，