What constitutes an academic publication for people in the Creative Writing field?
There are plenty of scholarly essays that can be written about creative writing. 

Here's a CV from one professor who teaches creative writing extensively. It lists, as well as books, short fiction, and poems she has published, a long series of scholarly essays that seem like your "literary analysis" category (titles like "Reed-Kellogg Diagramming and Vernacular Speech: ‘Telling It Slant’ in the Introductory Classroom", “Robert Penn Warren and Psychological Pastoralism,” “Agency in All the Kings’ Men: The Issue of Anne Stanton,”). 

She also has a series of essays on writing which are probably what you're talking about with your "articles on the effectiveness of various writing techniques, tropes, themes, plot devices" such as “Don’t Be Afraid to Write Badly,” The American Scholar, January 2017 and “Writing ‘Bush,’” Fourth Genre, Summer 2011.

Here's another CV from an "Assistant Professor of Poetry &amp; Creative Nonfiction" who has a section for "Selected Prose (Creative &amp; Critical)" that includes what looks like both literary analysis and essays on the "effectiveness of various writing techniques" (Writers on Writing, “Why to Kill Your Paradise").

So yes, it seems that there are publications that take a scholarly attitude toward creative writing, and at least some professors of creative writing do publish in them.