AWOP

Welcome to the Academic Wheel of Privilege (AWoP)!

Note: The current version is designed for desktop/laptop. It will likely not be usable on a mobile or touch-screen device. See the FAQs for other current limitations, including accessibility.

This app is designed to support equity-based authorship decisions in team scholarship. We strongly recommend that you read the companion paper before using this app. It sets out key decisions, use cases and motivations.

You can also click through these slides for some brief instructions (using the and buttons on the sides).

Step 1: Examine

Learn what the AWoP is about, so you can decide whether it's for you and your research team.

All members of the team should read the the companion article and consider whether your particular needs would benefit from this procedure for deciding authorship author. In brief, it is an alternative to randomization, alphabetical ordering, or other similar procedures used when authorship ordering is not transparently based on weighting individual contributions.

You may also want to consult the article's supplementary material and explore the various tabs in this app.

Although this app can be used to quantify team members' relative privilege, the recommended procedure for using the AWoP includes team discussions and reflections. The process should center human perspectives, not numeric scores. Consider carefully whether your team is willing to engage in such discussions.

Step 2: Prepare

Together with your research team, decide if and/or how you will use it.

First, the AWoP should only be used if the team democratically agrees to use it. If so, discuss whether to use it as a standalone framework, or as complemeting CRediT, Tenzing or some other framework. Discuss whether to use AWoP for the entire authorship order, or just for those positions (e.g., middle authors) where individual levels of contribution are hard to differentiate.

If you chose to use the AWoP, you should agree on a recording system. This includes picking a team member to be the "responsible person" who will manage reporting, ordering, and other practical matters. Team members should be able to confidentially report their AWoP scores to the responsible person.

Document authorship contributions through complementary frameworks such as CRediT or Tenzing, as you may need this information (e.g., for journal submissions) even if using the AWoP as a standalone framework.

Step 3: Evaluate

Use the AWoP to assess relative academic privilege.

1. Customize. Note: The current version of the AWoP has 24 default categories, all weighted equally. We recognize these don't apply across all cultural contexts. This app currently offers limited customisability, though if you wish to customise it, the team should agree on what sociocultural identity categories to include or exclude, and how to weight them. Better customisability (including storage of your design choices) is planned for future updates. In the meantime, if you wish to use custom categories or scoring weights, the responsible person could generate a survey using Google forms, Qualtrics, an Excel sheet with inserted formulas to aggregate responses, or even a paper survey with self-scoring instructions. Bear in mind that team members should just share their final aggregated score, rather than their raw responses to each particular category, to maintain privacy.

2. Assess. Next, team members should evaluate their levels of privilege across categories. If using the defaults, this can be done via the Explore tab above. Final scores can be calculated using the Calculate () button.

Step 4: Record

Share responses and decide authorship order.

Team members should report those scores to the responsible person (though if the team previously agreed a more open procedure, scores could be shared with the whole team). The responsible person should then sort scores in ascending numerical order and use these to implement whatever decisions about authorship order the team previously agreed on (lower scores reflect lower privilege, thus relatively earlier positions in authorship ordering).

When the authorship order is finalised, the process you used to determine this must be reported in your research paper. This can be done in an author note or in a sub-section of a paper's Methods section.

Don't forget to cite the AWoP article: Middleton, S. L., Sulik, J., Iley, B., Elsherif, M. M., & Azevedo, F. (2026). The Academic Wheel of Privilege: An equity-based tool for authorship order. [Preprint]. https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/af4nk.

Step 5: Reflect

Consider how the process worked for you.

After authorship order has been decided, we encourage users to reflect (individually and/or as a team) on the process of using the Academic Wheel of Privilege framework. This could involve a team debriefing or writing a reflective diary about your experience with AWoP. Reflection questions are provided in the online supplementary materials of the accompanying paper.

If you would like to share any of your comments with us, please do so via the email listed under the FAQ tab above. We welcome comments, queries or feedback about using the framework. We also welcome bug reports for the app itself.

Step 6: Learn

Learn more about academic privilege.

If you would like to explore the Academic Wheel of Privilege further, we have a number of resources which can help this:

Extended descriptions of the Academic Wheel of Privilege identity categories are available through our annotated bibliography (coming soon!)
A syllabus teaching how social location shapes experiences and outcomes in academia is available as part of our educational resources (coming soon!)
Case studies which showcase the intersecting influences on one's academic trajectory are available as part of our educational resources (coming soon!)
More educational resources may be produced in the future. Stay tuned!

Feel free to start exploring the AWoP at the Explore tab above!

Instructions

Mouse around the wheel to explore. Hovering over a category will display more info below.

Click on the High, Mid or Low Privilege circles to rate your own position.

Clicking the quotation icon (visible below after you've moused over a category) will show relevant citations. You can also click your right mouse button while hovering over any of the categories in the wheel to see citations.

(These buttons will be useable once you've made some selections)

Show less info

Low
Mid
High

Customise the AWoP

The following are the 24 default categories, response options and weightings. You can edit any of the default categories simply by tweaking the text in the form below. You can also add () or delete () categories.

We've grouped the default categories into some broad themes. You can add a new category under an existing theme or add a whole new theme via the navigation bar on the left.

You can choose to save your customised AWoP, which will yield a URL that you can share with others. While we obviously would then store your customisations, we do not store any responses or scores made using the AWoP.

About

The Academic Wheel of Privilege is a tool designed to guide authors through decisions on authorship order, as a equitable alternative to randomising or alphabetising. The framework complements existing merit-based authorship frameworks like CRediT (Allen et al., 2014; 2018).

The Academic Wheel of Privilege is adapted from existing work which encourages visualisation of one's privileges, or lack thereof. The original Wheel of Privilege was published by Sisneros et al. (2008) and popularised by Sylvia Duckworth. It is a regular feature of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training.

Drawing on the intersectionality framework developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), the Academic Wheel of Privilege builds upon this work by focusing on identities and experiences relevant to academia. This could mean identities which affect one's likelihood of progressing in education (e.g., experiences during childhood), which influence academic "productivity" (e.g., grant acceptance), or are otherwise regularly biased against by existing systems (e.g., migration status). The Academic Wheel of Privilege allows individuals to share and reflect on their social position, without risking the potential negative consequences of disclosing those identities.

An earlier version of the Academic Wheel of Privilege was first introduced through the FORRT Team Neurodiversity Position Statement (Elsherif et al., 2022; Phan et al., 2025). For that statement, the team agreed that all authors would be joint first authors. They then used the earlier version of the AWoP to determine the list order. To do this, each team member reflected on their position within the wheel's diverse categories depending on their identities and experiences. The team agreed that categories in the outer ring of circles would count as one point, the middle two points, and the innermost as three points. Team members calculated a sum score of these points, with each identity weighted equally.

Although this exercise was insightful, manually using the diagram proved difficult. Consequently, we have developed this app to streamline the process of calculating one's AWoP score. We hope that this will be useful as a method to determine authorship order or simply as a self-reflection exercise.

Using the Academic Wheel of Privilege framework requires a small amount of preparation beforehand. Any team wishing to use the Academic Wheel of Privilege should follow the steps listed under the "Start" tab above. An important part of this is reading the article which contextualises and explains the AWoP, available at https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/af4nk.

Accessibility Statement

We are working to make our app accessible to as many people as possible, but we recognize that we are not there yet. In particular, this initial version of the app is optimised for desktop/laptop devices rather than mobile devices, and it relies on visual cues and mouse clicks. As a team of volunteers with limited web-design skills, we chose this approach for the initial version in order to balance feasibility and reach. If you have skills in UX design for accessibility and are interested in helping us develop the app further, or even if you just have suggestions for the next version, please reach out to us at awop@forrt.org.

References

Allen, L., Scott, J., Brand, A., Hlava, M., & Altman, M. (2014). Publishing: Credit where credit is due. Nature, 508(7496), 312-313. https://doi.org/10.1038/508312a
Allen, L., O'Connell, A., & Kiermer, V. (2019). How can we ensure visibility and diversity in research contributions? How the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) is helping the shift from authorship to contributorship. Learned Publishing, 32(1), 71-73. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1210
Crenshaw, K. W. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, 8. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
Elsherif, M. M., Middleton, S. L., Phan, J. M., Azevedo, F., Iley, B. J., Grose-Hodge, M., Tyler, S. L., Kapp, S. K., Gourdon-Kanhukamwe, A., Grafton-Clarke, D., Yeung, S. K., Shaw, J. J., Hartmann, H., & Dokovova, M. (2022, June 20). Bridging neurodiversity and open scholarship: How shared values can guide best practices for research integrity, social justice, and principled education. MetaArXiV. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/k7a9p
Phan, J. M., Middleton, S. L., Azevedo, F., Iley, B. J., Grose‐Hodge, M., Tyler, S. L., Kapp., S. K., Yeung, S. K., Shaw, J. J., Hartmann, H., & FORRT. (2025). Bridging neurodiversity and open scholarship: how shared values can guide best practices for research integrity, social justice, and principled education. Journal of Social Issues, 81(4), e70035. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.70035
Sisneros, J., Stakeman, C., Joyner, M. C., & Schmitz, C. L. (2008). Critical multicultural social work. Oxford University Press.

FAQs

The Academic Wheel of Privilege (AWoP) can be applied to a project at any point before the authorship order is finalised. However, we recommend agreeing contribution and authorship requirements early in the project to prevent potential conflict.

We provide a macro-level framework with default categories that consider a wide range of socio-economic and cultural identities. A wide scope enables us to evaluate broader scale social patterns and increase relevance to users. However, you can further customise the AWoP for your local context via the "Customise" tab above.

Depending on article type and journal policies, a short statement about authorship order using the Academic Wheel of Privilege can be written in the author note, positionality section or contributor section of journal articles.

An example statement: Authorship order was determined using the Academic Wheel of Privilege (Middleton et al., 2026). {Initials} was responsible for generating an Academic Wheel of Privilege for the team. All authors shared their AWoP scores within the authorship team. Scores were ordered numerically in ascending order. Authorship order reflects this.

If you are using our framework, manuscript, diagram or App, please cite the following manuscript:

Middleton, S. L., Sulik, J., Iley, B., Elsherif, M. M., & Azevedo, F. (2026). The Academic Wheel of Privilege: An equity-based tool for authorship order. [Preprint] https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/af4nk.

We welcome constructive feedback, particularly in relation to cultural sensitivities of our default categories and bugs within the app. Please email us your comments at awop@forrt.org.

Yes, we will be updating the app with bug fixes and new features. If you have suggestions (or are willing to contribute) for improved accessibility, please contact us at awop@forrt.org.

If you have ideas for further developing the AWoP or applying it in a research study, please let us know at awop@forrt.org.

Here we set out the Academic Wheel of Privilege framework for authorship, but we acknowledge it has been used as an diversity, equity and inclusion resource, for instance in training contexts. We strongly advocate for careful consideration of using this framework for applications beyond authorship to avoid misuse or weaponisation, which could cause additional harm to marginalised people.

The Academic Wheel of Privilege framework, manuscript and diagram are licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This means that you may share and adapt the content, but you must give appropriate credit, link back to the original source (our manuscript), and you are not permitted to use the material for commercial purposes.

The Academic Wheel of Privilege App is free to use for all non-commercial purposes, but the source code is not public and is held under a proprietary license. FORRT reserves full copyright over the App itself. If you wish to use our App for commercial purposes, or are aware of someone doing so without permission, please let us know via awop@forrt.org.

This website does not store any user responses, neither selections of levels of privilege within the AWoP nor the aggregate score. That information is processed only within the user's web browser.

If you choose to customize the AWoP, we will need to store your choices for the customized categories/levels, but as with the default version, we do not store any responses generated by users of your customized wheel.

Citations:

Terms of service

Customise the AWoP

About

Accessibility Statement

References

FAQs

When in the project pipeline should the Academic Wheel of Privilege be used?

How do I make the AWoP categories more personalized to my context?

My team used AWoP to decide authorship order. How do we report it?

How do I credit the Academic Wheel of Privilege?

How can I provide feedback or report a bug?

Are you updating the app?

How can I contribute?

Can I use AWoP for something else other than deciding authorship order?

What license does AWoP have?

Do you store users' responses?