On the 17th of February 2021, eFood published an Expression of Concern (DOI: 10.2991/efood.k.210216.001) to alert readers to several concerns raised with regards to the veracity of the data and analyses conducted by the corresponding author, Jianbo Xiao. Journal readers have alerted the publisher on February 10th, 2021, and the University of Vigo together with the publisher opened investigations into data originality and experimental design by the authors on the subject of industry soy sauce products.

The review of the article showed inconsistency with values of glutamate concentration data between the abstract and throughout the original manuscript, as well as it had no direct approach to the methodology used to draw a statistical model between data. Furthermore, there has been no evidence to where each figure data has been provided. Separately, the editors also found that the authorship of this article is under dispute. The paper was submitted for publication without Jianlin Wu’s consent or knowledge.

The independent third-party reviewers have recommended this article be retracted due to the following reasons:

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  Concerns about data originality and source, as well as the validity of statistical model upon which the article has been hypothesized.

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  The experimental design method was not clarified and did not show the route to the results of the article in question.

The retraction has been formally approved by the Editors of eFood and the author.

Atlantis press strives to uphold the high standards of publication ethics, set by the Committee On Publishing Ethics (COPE).