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In this paper, we propose a data-driven model reduction method to solve parabolic inverse source problems efficiently. Our method consists of offline and online stages. In the off-line stage, we explore the low-dimensional structures in the solution space of the parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) in the forward problem with a given class of source functions and construct a small number of proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) basis functions to achieve significant dimension reduction. Equipped with the POD basis functions, we can solve the forward problem extremely fast in the online stage. Thus, we develop a fast algorithm to solve the optimization problem in the parabolic inverse source problems, which is referred to as the POD algorithm in this paper. Under a weak regularity assumption on the solution of the parabolic PDEs, we prove the convergence of the POD algorithm in solving the forward parabolic PDEs. In addition, we obtain the error estimate of the POD algorithm for parabolic inverse source problems. Finally, we present numerical examples to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. Our numerical results show that the POD algorithm provides considerable computational savings over the finite element method.