Anomalous diffusion in the presence or absence of an external force field is often modelled in terms of the fractional evolution equations, which can involve the hyper-singular source term. For this case, conventional time stepping methods may exhibit a severe order reduction. Although a second-order numerical algorithm is provided for the subdiffusion model with a simple hyper-singular source term \(t^{\mu }\) , \(-2<\mu <-1\) in [arXiv:2207.08447], the convergence analysis remain to be proved. To fill in these gaps, we present a simple and robust smoothing method for the hyper-singular source term, where the Hadamard finite-part integral is introduced. This method is based on the smoothing/IDm-BDFk method proposed by Shi and Chen (SIAM J Numer Anal 61:2559–2579, 2023) for the subdiffusion equation with a weakly singular source term. We prove that the kth-order convergence rate can be restored for the diffusion-wave case \(\gamma \in (1,2)\) and sketch the proof for the subdiffusion case \(\gamma \in (0,1)\) , even if the source term is hyper-singular and the initial data is not compatible. Numerical experiments are provided to confirm the theoretical results.
