There is not one single right way of doing science

 It has been said that "There are as many ways of doing science as there are scientists." That is surely an exaggeration, but there is definitely more than one way of doing science.* I have argued that being a scientist is just being intelligent (plus careful hard work).** I have also argued that intelligence is a vector quantity, one can be intelligent in various different ways.***

A given "scientific method" may also be subdivided and a scientist may specialize in just one of the resulting pieces.**** The scientific endeavor as a whole becomes a group effort. Publications may also be quite specialized/focused. I'll give an example from my plasma confinement work. We had calculated the curves describing particle and energy balance for a linear solenoid dominated by endloss. These had been verified by comparison with experiment. We then calculated (and published) the curves that resulted when other different loss mechanisms/scalings were active. These might possibly describe other confinement devices. 

Not everyone is going to be following "THE scientific method" in every one of their publications. There are different ways to do science as there are different ways in which to think.*****

* Theories of Scientific Method, Nola and Sankey, McGill-Queen's U. Press, 2007.

**See, for example, my blog of 1 September 2012.

*** See, for example, my blogs of 23 August 2010 and 8 September 2011.

**** For example: theory, computation, experiment.

***** For example: induction, deduction, abduction.