Jim Giles is a reporter for the San Francisco bureau of New Scientist. He writes about science, politics and the environment.
Until April 2007, Giles wrote for the journal Nature. In December 2005, he and colleagues published a story that compared the accuracy of science articles in Wikipedia to those in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Peer reviewers recruited by Nature identified an average of four inaccuracies in the Wikipedia articles they examined and an average of around three in articles on the same topics in Britannica.[1] Britannica subsequently criticized the story,[2] prompting Nature to clarify the methodology used[3] to compile the results.
In 2009, Giles asked ten prominent scientists to come together and discuss the future of the Nobel Prizes. The group, which included Tim Hunt, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, called for the creation of new Nobel prizes for the environment and public health. The group also recommended expanding the medicine prize to include disciplines such as ecology, which are not currently covered by the prize. The group's recommendation were published on 5 October 2009 in an open letter to the Nobel Foundation.
Giles studied physics at the University of Bristol. He received a master's degree in computational neuroscience from the University of Oxford. Giles initially developed exihibitions at the Science Museum in London, joining Nature in 2001 as a news and features editor and becoming a reporter for the journal in 2003.