I think you are tripping over the multi-pass nature of LaTex plus Bibtex. If you look at Step 3 in this discussion, you'll see the following:
The first run (through latex)
generates an auxiliary file,
paper.aux, containing information
about citations (and other types of
references), the bibliography style
used, and the name of the bibtex
database. The second run (through
bibtex) uses the information in the
auxiliary file, along with the data
contained in the bibtex database, to
create a file paper.bbl. This file
contains a thebibliography environment
with \bibitem entries formatted
according to the bibliography style
specified.
So, what I think is happening is that your name_of_my_file.aux
file still contains your placeholder \cite{test}
. If you remove the auxiliary file, you should be able to start over with:
latex name_of_my_file
bibtex name_of_my_file
latex name_of_my_file
latex name_of_my_file
[Update based on additional info]: The problem was that you had a .aux
file with your \cite{}
still embedded. The second time that you ran latex
, you overrode the old file with the new. That's why the complete set of steps includes an initial latex
call, a bibtex
call and two follow-up latex
calls. Think of it as a multi-pass compiler and it might be more intuitive.