that is why you don't get bibtex run then ;) try this
(setq org-latex-pdf-process
       '("pdflatex -shell-escape -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory
%o %b"
         "bibtex %b"
         "pdflatex -shell-escape -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory
%o %b"
         "pdflatex -shell-escape -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory
%o %b"))

John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu


On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 1:04 PM, Nikolai <nikolai.stenfors@gapps.umu.se>
wrote:

> Eric S Fraga <e.fraga <at> ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>
> >
> > On Saturday,  6 Feb 2016 at 14:42, Nikolai Stenfors wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > Org-ref appears to be an excellent reference handling tool for
> org-mode. I
> > > have followed the installation according to org-ref homepage.
> > > However, I have problems exporting the org-file to pdf. The generated
> > > intermediate latex-file appears visually OK. In the pdf, references are
> > > shown as [?] and no bibliography is generated.
> >
> > What is the setting of org-latex-to-pdf-process?  It looks like bibtex
> > was not run, having looked at the LaTeX code that was generated, which
> > looks perfectly fine.  Have you looked at the LaTeX log output when
> > exporting to PDF?  There will be a buffer with this log.
>
>
> OK,
>
> pdflatex -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory %o %f
> pdflatex -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory %o %f
> pdflatex -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory %o %f
>
> tried to add "bibtex %b" or  "bibtex %o %f" without luck
>
> Nikolai
>
>
>