The default behaviour of MATLAB for log scale plots is to give tick marks only at powers of 10. Where the data varies by only a factor of less than 10000, there aren't enough tick marks to be useful. LOGTICKS calculates tick marks at k*10^j, where k can be in {1,2,5}, {1,2}, or simply {1} over a requested range.

The output is given as a structure with two fields: a vector of tick locations, and a cell array of labels for the ticks.

Please see the picture for an example of its use.