**1. Introduction**

The technological transition from a brown economy (based mainly on the exploitation of fossil fuels) to a green economy (based on renewable energy sources) is a multidimensional, worldwide process [1,2] that involves all sectors of the modern economy [3,4]. This process is the result of the need to implement the idea of Sustainable Development (SD) in socio-economic practice [5,6]. The assumption is that the green economy is about conducting all economic activities with respect for nature's assets and in such a way as to prevent irreversible changes to the environment [7]. Therefore, there are changes taking place in all business processes and decision-making aiming at a low-carbon, and a resource-efficient economy based on green technologies [8,9]. The examples of the changes towards SD are visible in all economic sectors and there is a gradual green transformation of the whole economy taking place [10,11]. This shift towards a green economy is particularly visible in the labor market [12,13]. In this economic area, there is the creation of new jobs or the change of existing jobs for the needs of a gradually greening or circular economy [14,15]. Such jobs created as a result of pro-environmental transformations of activities undertaken by various types of entities are called green jobs (GJs) [9,16,17]. GJs are the result of the ongoing transformation focused on SD [18] and are an important part of the scientific analyses raised around the topic of a green economy [19,20]. In particular, the scientific literature

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**Citation:** Kozar, Ł.J.; Sulich, A. Green Jobs: Bibliometric Review. *Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health* **2023**, *20*, 2886. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph20042886

Academic Editor: Delfina G. Ramos

Received: 15 January 2023 Revised: 3 February 2023 Accepted: 6 February 2023 Published: 7 February 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

emphasizes that employees employed in GJs should be characterized by appropriate levels of knowledge [21,22], skills [23,24], attitudes [25], and pro-environmental behavior [26,27]. Hence, there are a growing number of scientific studies addressing the issue of the green competence of employees [28,29]. Based on previous research on the issue of GJs, it is possible not only to point out how they differ from non-green jobs [30,31], but also to draw the conclusion that it is on the degree of development of human capital in the context of sustainability issues that progress aimed at greening modern economies depends [32]. GJs can be characterized by both quality and degree of greening [9,33]. Thus, GJs can be called a kind of litmus test of the greening of modern economies of both the countries concerned and international communities [34].

There is an ongoing scientific discussion on the question of defining what GJs are [9,15]. This discussion is triggered by diverse scientific and research approaches to such specific positions [35,36]. The result of the considerations undertaken by researchers is the identification of GJs with given economic sectors [37,38], which are called green sectors [39,40], or with specific jobs [41,42]. According to the most popular definition of GJs, they represent "work in agricultural, manufacturing, research and development, administrative, and service activities that contribute substantially to preserving or restoring environmental quality" [43]. Recently, special attention has been paid to the energy sector [44,45], where it is indicated that the transformation of this sector towards renewable energy sources contributes to the creation of GJs [4,33]. In addition, researchers on the subject recognize another important aspect resulting from the indicated transformation, namely that the renewable energy sector creates more jobs per unit of energy than the fossil fuel-based sector [46,47]. Thus, what is occurring in this area is not only a qualitative change in jobs but also the creation of new GJs [48,49]. In light of the research conducted to date on the topic of GJs, a view directed toward qualitative research of all jobs in the economy in terms of their greening is also evident [9,50].

The aim of this article is to identify key areas around which the topic of GJs revolves in the literature. Such an area-based systematization is important since a significant systematic research gap is still apparent in this field. Previous literature studies aimed at this goal primarily ignore the issue of the different nomenclature of GJs [51], or analyze the indicated issues in rather narrow periods [52], and thus make the undertaken deductions incomplete. The research problems observed are the main reason for this study. The purpose of the article presented above is accompanied by verification of the statement that GJs and their nomenclature are constantly evolving, which in itself is an important field for researchers and management theory development.

To achieve a such goal to identify key areas and keywords, around which GJs are developed in the scientific literature, the bibliometric analysis was performed. The adopted method was Structured Literature Review (SLR) variation method with queries. The scientific database explored in this bibliometric study is the Scopus collection of peerreviewed articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, etc. In this study, the whole collection was analyzed according to the presented in the Materials and Methods section methodology. Using the VOSviewer software (version 1.6.18) the co-occurrences networks were generated to identify associations between frequently occurring keywords in scientific articles indexed in Scopus.

Following the logic adopted in this paper as a bibliometric review, the presentation of the GJs subject is divided into four interrelated sections. After presenting in the first section the reasons for bibliometric research and explaining the purpose of the work, a description of the research methodology is presented in the second section. The results of the research are presented in the third section with the support of bibliometric maps and their descriptions. The article concludes with a discussion of the results, along with recommendations and directions for future research on the GJs subject.
