This paper deals with an inverse problem of determining a heat source function in heat conduction equations when the solution is known in a discrete point set. Being different from other ordinary inverse source problems which are often dependent on only one variable, the unknown coefficient in this paper not only depends on the space variable x, but also depends on the time t. On the basis of the optimal control framework, the inverse problem is transformed into an optimization problem. The existence and necessary condition of the minimizer for the cost functional are established. The convergence of the minimizer as the mesh parameters tend to zero is also proved. The conjugate gradient method is applied to the inverse problem and some typical numerical experiments are performed in the paper. The numerical results show that the proposed method is stable and the unknown heat source is recovered very well. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.