Originally published at Random Geekage You can comment here or there.

Just had a small problem getting a citation to work in my dissertation. I am using pdflatex to render my dissertation into pdf format and bibtex to handle the references.

The trick is to not use the file extension of the tex file. If your file was called file.tex (yay imagination) you would do

pdflatex file
bibtex file
pdflatex file
pdflatex file

Running pdflatex multiple times is necessary to make sure everything is included in the final document.

Source (Not using Lyx so I have no idea about the top part)