Conceptual papers that offer new theories are hard to write and even harder to publish. You do not have empirical data to back up your arguments, which makes the papers easy to reject in the review cycle. We are also typically not well trained in theorizing, and there isn't even a clear process to theorizing we could learn or follow. Does that mean that we shouldn't even try to write theory papers? We ponder these questions, figure out what is so hard in writing conceptual papers – and share a few tricks that might help if you still wanted to write such a paper. 

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