My attention has just been drawn to the citations per paper indicator in the 2011 QS Asian University Rankings. In first place is University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines, a very good school in some ways but not usually considered as a research rival to Hong Kong or Tokyo. It seems that UST's success was the result of just one much cited medical paper of which just one UST researcher was a co-author.
Another highly cited many-authored medical paper seems to explain Universitas Padjadjaran's appearance in sixth place in this indicator even though the total number of papers is extremely small.
Leiden University have started offering fractional counting of publications in their rankings:
The fractional counting method gives less weight to collaborative publications than to non-collaborative ones. For instance, if the address list of a publication contains five addresses and two of these addresses belong to a particular university, then the publication has a weight of 0.4 in the calculation of the bibliometric indicators for this university. The fractional counting method leads to a more proper normalization of indicators and to fairer comparisons between universities active in different scientific fields. Fractional counting is therefore regarded as the preferred counting method in the Leiden Ranking.
This would be one way of avoiding giving a high position to universities that produce little but manage to get researchers included as co-authors a few papers, usually in medical journals,
