There's a decent book on this (and it's FREE!)

The data

I get most of my data from Web of Science, which I'm able to access here when on the Cornell internet.
I use a nice scraper, which methodically downloads records 500 at a time.

There are other sources of bibliographic data, but I can't speak to most of them. WoS has proved to be clean and reliable, and others have just presented me with issues.

• Academic tree - ancestry of academics, who mentors who, seems really useful
• Open Syllabus project - have wanted to use this data for a while. millions of syllabi in the last couple decades
• Dimensions - dynamic linked research data platform that re-imagines the way research can be discovered, accessed and analyzed
• Microsoft Academic - to help the academic community find academic content, researchers, institutions, and activities
• Semantic Scholar - AI-powered research tool for scientific literature

The software

• VOSviewer and (much less so) CitNetExplorer.
• In R, use bibliometrix (also there is wosr but I don't know what it does)
• I don't know any tools in python, but once you extract the WOS bibliographic data (most easily using VOSviewer) you can export to a network and analyze using typical social network analysis tools, some of which are OK in Python