According to the publication cycle, both are interrelated and require high-quality efforts to get successfully published by a prestigious journal. Having a bad way of advertising an impressive product will definitely lead to nowhere. Apart from your contributions and based on my experience, I would say that writing a high-quality paper would contribute to 40% of the research cycle. Presenting your work is not an easy process. It takes multiple rounds of revision to make sure that you have got everything that you need in a clear and accurate way.

According to the publication cycle, both are interrelated and require high-quality efforts to get successfully published by a prestigious journal. Having a bad way of advertising an impressive product will definitely lead to nowhere. Apart from your contributions and based on my experience, I would say that writing a high-quality paper would contribute to 40% of the research cycle. Presenting your work is not an easy process. It takes multiple rounds of revision to make sure that you have got everything that you need in a clear and accurate way.

I agree with Mohammed Alser in the sense that both depend on each other. I believe that the answer to your question answered skills possessed by each researcher: some people like more the part of the research, others the part of writing the paper. The truth is that good research greatly facilitates the writing process and a well-written paper facilitates the dissemination of research you have done. In my case, within four months of spending a long time researching, I appreciate much enjoy the process of writing the paper.

I am not a scientist but a scholar in the humanities, hence my answer might differ slightly from those of academics working in fields that are based on empirical data and experimental research. Since a (if not: the most!) substantial part of my own research process is reading & excerpting written source materials, the activity of writing is inextricably entwined into my research activities, so that I cannot judge or even measure its difficulty against that of a research separate from writing. It is only in writing that I can gather a deeper understanding of my subject matter, connect my theses and arguments about it and develop models of whatever it is I am trying to understand. I would say that merely reading and thinking about things is usually mostly fun. Writing as my chief instrument of research and cognition is often painful and difficult, but also incredibly rewarding and joyful!

Good answers here Rafael. I think that the consensus, so far, is that they are difficult to separate out. Both processes, to me, are generally equally difficult or equally easy - depending on the nature of the task - or somewhere in-between. It depends on a whole raft of factors i.e. the nature of the study itself, the nature of the collaboration within the team etc. At the end of the day, no matter what skills are required, you cannot be an effective researcher if you are not also an effective author or at least know others that are).

In my opinion, researching part is more difficult in my domain of engineering discipline that I work. Writing is also equally difficult as to how best to present the work so that people who read will be able to understand easily what you wanted to communicate. However you get writing experience with each paper that you have written. Thus though in the beginning it is equally difficult, but with more practice you would know the technique of writing. But research is always going to be new because of the new knowledge that is expected from the research.

Well I'm going to answer when I should be writing the discussion of a paper so maybe you could infer my answer! However, I think they are difficult to separate if you are the one doing the writing/researching. And like Cornelia in much of what I do in qualitative research, the analysis is literally written into being so can't be separated. (This can cause its own problems when the writing implies a more finalised analysis than is necessarily true).

However as the consumer of the research I find you have to be more discerning to pull apart a particularly well written but maybe flawed study than you do an exemplary study that is badly written. As an editor of others work I find (and maybe this is just me) that I have real trouble seeing beyond poorly written research to what has been done.

I find researching takes more time especially during data collection / respondents' data not forthcoming.  I find writing academic article takes less time & easier.

However, I find marketing one's article even more difficult than researching & writing an academic paper.  Marketing one's article includes:

1) sourcing journals to submit your article - there are so many journals to choose from

2) change your article according to different journal requirements before submission

3) wait for journal peer review comments / decision - sometimes from 2 weeks to more than 10 months

4) revise article according to reviewers' comments - sometimes different reviewers' comments are contradicting each others, sometimes finding disagreed with the reviewers' view / comments

5) sometimes feel disappointed & demotivated when an article is rejected, after re-charged then repeat above step1 again

Doing research and writing it up require different skills. You need them both to do your job as researchers though you can have a preference, a gift or whatever you want to call it  for the one or the other. LIfe becomes easier if you integrate both skills like a dancer who masters different paces. Sometimes it is useful in a project to separate the research from the reporting stage. This is more easy in a quantitative than a qualitative project. Nevertheless there will always be interpenetrations. These are the difficult moments one has to learn to use them in a productive way. If you practice regular memo writing, writing will play a role during the whole research process. Sometimes during the writing stage you may have new ideas, you can find new ways have approaching a problem. This can mean that you back to coding or even to data collection. But one has to be cautious. One of the important matters to learn is to say: Stop it and write.

Research and writing academic papers for publication both are difficult and require high quality skill but I think writing an article is easier than to start a research.