I am trying to recreate a plot from a literature review. It is a scatter graph but the axis are labels more than specific numbers

I want to recreate this graph. I have used web plotter to extract all the data but defining the axes and the number of subcatagories is proving somewhat confusing. Each data point has a shape and a colour that represents the material and the country respectively.

[dpb]

The axis ticklabels are written as text although the data are datetime values on time axis,

Similarly for the y-axis; the data will have to be numeric but the ticks and ticklabels can then be set where desired.

The markerstyle and color are set by the individual data points

Answer 1

[A Poyser]

This is how I did it

% Define machining methods and their left y-axis values
methods = {'Laser', 'EDM', 'Mechanical', 'WaterJet'};
y_left = [10, 30, 55, 90]; % Left Y-axis values
x = zeros(size(y_left)); % All x-values are 0

% Create a figure and plot the data
figure;
plot(x, y_left, 'bo', 'MarkerSize', 8, 'LineWidth', 2); % Blue circular markers

% Customize the axes
xlabel('X Axis (Fixed at 0)');
ylabel('Left Y Axis Values');
title('Left Y Axis Values at X = 0');
grid on;

% Set x-axis limits for clarity
xlim([-1, 1]); % To keep x=0 clear
ylim([0, max(y_left) + 10]); % Adjust y-axis range for visibility

% Add left-justified text labels
hold on;
for i = 1:length(y_left)
    text(x(i) - 0.1, y_left(i), methods{i}, 'FontSize', 10, ...
        'VerticalAlignment', 'middle', 'HorizontalAlignment', 'left'); % Left-justified
end
hold off;

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I also set the limits and removed the markers, justified the labels and such but this is the basis of how I did it

Answer 2

[Steven Lord]

I'm not certain what the significance of the unlabeled horizontal lines are, but you can create a scatter plot with categorical and/or datetime data on the axes.

sz = ["Small", "Medium", "Large"];
C = categorical(sz, sz, Ordinal=true) % Ordinal because the sizes have an order

C = 1x3 categorical array
     Small      Medium      Large 

scatter([2 1 3], C)
title("Numeric X data, categorical Y data")

●

figure
dt = datetime([2025 2015 2020], 1, 1);
scatter(dt, C)
title("Datetime X data, categorical Y data")

[A Poyser]

I did this slightly differently, I cheated and used chatGPT to figure it out

[A Poyser]

Also I should ass the second horizontal lines are the right hand axis ffor sub categories of the left axis, so for mechanical you have drilling, grinding, etc.