how to show separate column unique values with SQL GROUP BY clause - php

Question

Alright, I can't bash my head at this anymore tonight. Thought I would pose the question. Maybe there's a simple answer I have not come across yet.
I have a number of related tables in PHPMyAdmin: pubtopics, pubtypes, and pubtitles.
Pubtitles is the main table (table 1), pubtopics is a simple list assigning a number to a topic (table 2), and pubtypes is another simple list assigning a number to a publication type (table 3).
I'm trying to create a page that lists every publication by type (list of all pubs in table 3), but also shows the multiple topics (table 2) that may be assigned to a unique pubtitle (table 1), and have each of those topics (table 2) link to publications listed by that topic.
The data for pubtopics looks something like this:
pubtopics
What I'm looking for is a line like this:
June 15, 2016 | Comparative Data Report | Education | Fiscal Affairs
Where the date is a link, the pub type is a link, and each of the concatenated issues is a unique link.
When I try to list all the publications for a specific publication type, all I can generate so far is either a list with multiple duplicate entries (because one may address several topics). I've tried group_concat and group by, but that doesn't allow me to have an individual link for each topic.
I've played around with explode and arrays, but it's a bit beyond my know-how. Any brilliant solutions?
Code looks like:
elseif (isset($_GET['type'])) {
$var3_getDisplay4 = $_GET['type'];
$query_getDisplay = sprintf("SELECT
DATE_FORMAT(publicationsnew.date, '%%Y') AS archive,
DATE_FORMAT(publicationsnew.date, '%%M %%e, %%Y') AS pubdate,
pub_type.number AS typelink,
pub_type.type AS pubtype,
GROUP_CONCAT(categories.category_name ORDER BY categories.category_name SEPARATOR ' | ') AS category,
categories.category_id AS catlink,
publicationsnew.title,
publicationsnew.author,
publicationsnew.imagelink,
publicationsnew.description
FROM
pub_cat
LEFT JOIN publicationsnew ON (pub_cat.pub_id = publicationsnew.pub_id)
LEFT JOIN categories ON (pub_cat.category_id = categories.category_id)
LEFT JOIN pub_type ON (publicationsnew.type = pub_type.number)
WHERE pub_type.number = %s
GROUP BY publicationsnew.pub_id
ORDER BY publicationsnew.date DESC",
GetSQLValueString($var3_getDisplay4, "text"));
and in the body:
<?php do { ?>
<h2><?php echo $row_getDisplay['pubdate']; ?> | <?php echo $row_getDisplay['pubtype']; ?> |
<a href="test.php?topic=<?php echo $row_getDisplay['catlink']; ?>">
<?php echo $row_getDisplay['category']; ?>
</a>
</h2>
<p class="pubtitle"><?php echo $row_getDisplay['title']; ?></p>
<?php echo ($row_getDisplay['author']); ?>
<?php echo ($row_getDisplay['imagelink']); ?>
<div class="pubdescription"><?php echo ($row_getDisplay['description']); ?></div>
<div class="clear"></div>
<hr>
<?php } while ($row_getDisplay = mysql_fetch_assoc($getDisplay)); ?>
Burned out for the day. To be continued...