A lot of references to other articles, books etc. are made in a scientific article. BibTeX closely cooperates with LaTeX in order to take care of our bibliography. In fact, many people started using LaTeX/BibTeX for the very reason of hassle-free citations. 

The good news is, you can start using your bibliography (.bib file) while writing your text in LyX. Just choose a citation style, and be assured you can come back to this decision any time.