This is an interesting but also very complex question.
On the simplest level, my answer is no for most of your list (specifically, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology to which I might add ethics, social philosophy, every era in the history of philosophy). Instead, these are the things that people research rather than techniques used for doing research.
Dialectics is a hard one depending on what is meant by the term. By and large, contemporary philosophers will associate this with Hegel's philosophical method or with Marx's -- both of which are (largely though not universally) despised by the majority of philosophers.
Logic is for most philosophers a key part of their tool kit. Here, this should be taken to mean sentential logic, categorical logic, analogies, and (to differing degrees) modal logic. (For those who specifically study logic or philosophy of math as an area of research -- I believe we had one researcher who answered a few questions here for a bit -- the may also study more esoteric things like tri-valued logics or deontic logic which are not a part of the universal toolkit).
Having given the answer, no, I should explain several ways that this could prove to be an inadequate answer.
First, I'm working from my experience plus how I've seen other philosophers work. I can think of four types of philosophers I've encountered: contemporary analytics, contemporary continentals, historical figures or periods - translation / exposition, and historical figures or periods - comparative. For all categories, a major component of research is reading.
Maybe it might be easiest to start with the last two categories in terms of how the research process works. For historical translation / exposition philosophers, a good deal of what they do is read texts in the original language, provide translations, and argue about interpretations of the arguments. For historical comparative philosophers, they work with historical texts and contemporary texts to suggest either contemporary solutions to historical problems or historical solutions to contemporary problems (there's a good deal of variation where you could replace "solution" and "problem"). They key thing that makes this philosophy rather than history is that they are focused on offering arguments.
For contemporary analytics, most of their reading is going to be contemporary, and comparatively, they will have taken more logic. Also, some of them are going to need to be up to speed on research in other fields -- like neuroscience, chemistry, or psychology. The point is that they are offering arguments using logic and analogies to support positions on issues that matter to them.
Contemporary continentals sometimes do research like historical philosophers do. Others have what at least to me looks like a religious interest in some contemporary philosopher (for instance Judith Butler or Julia Kristeva or Martin Heidegger) where they mostly argue with others in their sub-discipline about interpretations or implementations.
All of that being said, people who write about ethics, social philosophy, aesthetics, or other similar things may often also include metaphysics/epistemology/etc as tools. As in they may give an account of art based on Kant's ideas in epistemology and art. Or they may give an account of morality building on Aristotle's account of human persons. The same pattern can also happen with epistemologists building on preferred metaphysics and then metaphysics people building on more fundamental metaphysics and logic. But it's also possible that they are positing something that is simultaneously metaphysics and epistemology rather than using any of these as a tool.
Others may have a different account of the sort of methods professional philosophers undertake... If so, I'll gladly defer to clearer accounts of how this works.
Maybe to make it more practical, here's what I do in my own research:
Type A
- read a whole lot
- notice something interesting in primary literature
- focus in on secondary literature to see if I've got something interesting to say
- compile the paper
- revise and refine its arguments
- submit, rinse, repeat
Type B
- Have an insight that I think would make a good paper
- Work on the argument / read papers in the vicinity of what I'm hoping to say
- Either be convinced I have something worth saying and revise / add sources OR give up.
- Further refinement
- Submit, rinse, repeat
(Of course once it's accepted, there may still be a lot of work to do on it).
This takes months or even years in actual time (though actual time is interrupted by many other obligations).
If there's a better method that would get me either (a) better publications or (b) more publications for my time, I'd love to hear it.
