Selectively turn off hyperref links for citations

Environment NoHyper should help:

\begin{NoHyper}\cite{foobar}\end{NoHyper}

A star form is problematic, because some citing commands already have one (e.g. \citep, \citet). But macros can be defined, e.g.:

\newcommand*{\nolink}[1]{%
  \begin{NoHyper}#1\end{NoHyper}%
}

\nolink{\cite{foobar}}

Heiko's answer is great. However, it doesn't work inside captions, for instance. To make it work, use:

\newcommand*{\nolink}[1]{%
  {\protect\NoHyper#1\protect\endNoHyper}%
}

The curly braces inside are important.

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