RCR (Responsible Conduct of Research)

As part of my final year of fellowship as a SIRE Graduate Fellow at Emory University, I am leading a summer course on Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) for undergraduate researchers who are engaging in full-time research over the summer. RCR is not distinct to Emory, but is mandated by the NIH and NSF for those engaging in research funded by its various grants. During the school year I had a mixed group (humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences) of undergraduate students, but over the summer, my students are entirely made up of researchers in the natural sciences. I enjoy this very much as my own undergraduate background was in biology/evolution and I remain intrigued and interested in the kinds of research conducted in the natural sciences.

What I began to realize throughout this summer as we talked about issues such as "authorship" and "conflict of interest," "data management," "human and animal subjects" (all important topics for any type of research), there is no governing guideline of literature, as far as I know, such as the one provided by NSF and a host of other scientific institutions for how such topics might be applied in the social sciences, still less in the humanities. A quick Google search, however, yields some results at various institutions (to varying levels of complexity/clarity) that have tried to address this.

It seems to me to be a deficiency in our own training and/or our teaching of undergraduate students interested in pursuing further research in the humanities. Certainly the NEH has something like this called "Research Misconduct Policy" (here), but I would not doubt if not a single person who is publishing in my field currently has gone through any kind of formal training in RCR that exists for every single undergraduate/graduate student (then postdocs + PIs) working under the auspices of the NSF, NIH, or other similar governing bodies. There are certainly cases of mentorship issues, professional misconduct, research ethics, and etc. that are found in the humanities, and the ad hoc nature of how some of these issues are dealt with in the humanities, I think, often gives the impression to those on the other side of the fence that much of what we do is subjective and/or just speaking past each other in the abstract.

Would it be possible to create such a curriculum for students/researchers in humanistic inquiry, and what would that look like?