Curious about how you've seen research work out

Something I've seen in nuclear materials research is that all of them are basically, I have a material, I am going to shoot energetic particles at it, I am going to record the numbers, take some before and after pictures and talk about what I saw. It does make sense that you would research like this considering most materials in nuclear environments do suffer bombardment from energetic nuclei and subatomic particles. The consistency in the formula of this research process, however, is something I did not expect. Is this how it works for every field when you get into something very specific and become an expert on it like in a PhD? For example, would experimental study of ionization in plasmas in space have you always looking at spectroscopic data from one cosmic body or another and accounting for what there is from your spectroscopic data and what all forces may have acted in that region and to what extent to give you what you have got?

Now that I put all my thoughts down, the answer seems like yes mostly. So I guess I'm probably looking for confirmation, unless there is something I didn't take note of.