orting a table by the last_name from another table

[danielkessler]

I'm sorry, I forgot to type the pipe after ','

Not reason for it not to work... a ColdFusion issue perhaps?... can you trick ColdFusion to show you the query is trying to submit?

The query is pretty straight-up since I'm just doing a test query for the comma, as you suggested. I added debug="yes" result="queryResult" and it does a dump of the sql. It's:
SELECT a_fname || ',' || a_lname FROM publications_authors
The dump of the query is here (it's the one in blue):
http://hhp.umd.edu/research/publications_display.cfm

So... if a publication has three authors you will have three entries in publications_authors, all of them with the same publicationa_id value, am I right?

If YES... you do not have an order there, Oracle might retrive first any of the three entries matching the key.

No, they have incrementing publicationa_id values, using nextVal. They all have the same publication_id from the publications table. So I want to sort all those publications in the publications table by the first author's last name from the publications_authors table.

Honestly, I'm not even sure how to work with the dataset once I get it since it'll show 3 entries for 3 authors for each publication (for example).

I know related tables are surely the way to go for flexibility, but I'm often left scatching my head when using them.