In reality, apart from a few strictly defined physical sciences, most scientific disciplines have to bend and adapt these rules, especially sciences involving the unpredictability of natural organisms and humans.
In many ways, it is not always important to know the exact scientific method, to the letter, but any scientist should have a good understanding of the underlying principles.
In many ways, if you are going to bend and adapt the rules, you need to understand the rules in the first place.
Empirical
Science is based purely around observation and measurement, and the vast majority of research involves some type of practical experimentation.
This can be anything, from measuring the Doppler Shift of a distant galaxy to handing out questionnaires in a shopping center. This may sound obvious, but this distinction stems back to the time of the Ancient Greek Philosophers.
Cutting a long story short, Plato believed that all knowledge could be reasoned; Aristotle that knowledge relied upon empirical observation and measurement.
This does bring up one interesting anomaly. Strictly speaking, the great physicists, such as Einstein and Stephen Hawking, are not scientists. They generate sweeping and elegant theories and mathematical models to describe the universe and the very nature of time, but measure nothing.
In reality, they are mathematicians, occupying their own particular niche, and they should properly be referred to as theoreticians.
Still, they are still commonly referred to as scientists and do touch upon the scientific method in that any theory they have can be destroyed by a single scrap of empirical evidence.
The Scientific Method Relies Upon Data
The scientific method uses some type of measurement to analyze results, feeding these findings back into theories of what we know about the world. There are two major ways of obtaining data, through measurement and