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