John, to come back to org-ref, which basically runs fine for me now, thanks.
I am running biblatex (as opposed to bibtex) though, with meanwhile biber as a backend. The biblatex manual is very comprehensible and explains the different citation commands from page 79 onwards. http://ctan.mirrorcatalogs.com/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex/doc/biblatex.pdf I just ran into this: Having added a few citations to an existing one with C-u C-c d, I have something like cite:foo,bar,baz which gets exported to latex as \cite{foo,bar,baz} whereas biblatex expects \cites{foo}{bar}{baz} as I understand (note the plural s as well), and there are other config tweekings I am doing for biblatex (that I intend to explain some other time). Maybe a switch (an org-ref variable) would be a good idea, that lets one choose: use either biblatex or plain old bibtex? thanks in advance -Andreas