This article is devoted to identifying a space-dependent source term in linear parabolic equations. Such a problem is ill posed, i.e., a small perturbation in the input data may cause a dramatically large error in the solution (if it exists). The conditional stability of the solution is analyzed. Based on a convoluting equation method, we can deal with the problem under the a priori parameter choice rule. Meanwhile, a modified version of Morozov's discrepancy principle is provided to decide on an a posteriori regularization parameter choice strategy and a log-type error estimate is obtained. Two numerical results show that our proposed method works well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]