BOSTON — In the trailer for the movie “Concussion,” star Will Smith says: “I found a disease that no one has ever seen.”

It’s a claim the real-life doctor portrayed by Smith, forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu, has himself made for years, giving a detailed description about how he came to name that disease “chronic traumatic encephalopathy.”

But Omalu neither discovered the disease nor named it, according to scientific journals and brain researchers who were interviewed by The Associated Press. And though no one doubts that Omalu’s diagnosis of Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster was pivotal in understanding the dangers of football, fellow researchers and a medical ethicist say Omalu goes too far when he publicly takes credit for naming or discovering CTE.

“It’s just not true, and I think he knows that,” said William Stewart, a neuropathologist at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland.

“Chronic traumatic encephalopathy has been around for decades. It’s not a new term,” Stewart said. “The only thing I would say that Bennet has done is that he identified it in an American footballer.”

In a telephone call to the AP on Thursday, Omalu angrily defended his work and attributed the criticisms to “people historically who have made a systematic attempt to discredit me, and to marginalize me.”

“This is totally false. And write that in a big font, that it is totally and completely false,” he shouted into the phone. “There is a good deal of jealousy and envy in my field. For me to come out and discover the paradigm shift, it upset some people.