In this paper, we are trying to find the developmental tendencies and study hotspots of intelligent transportation systems technologies by theme classification and analysis of core articles from all papers published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems during 2010-2013. First, we classify theme categories by co-word analysis with different research domains and obtain 12 themes that include vehicle control technology, modeling and simulation, image processing, etc. Second, we find research focuses and directions of these themes by analyzing the trends of the article numbers published in each year of the TOP 5 themes. Finally, we identify TOP 5 core articles of these 12 themes and obtain their specific study hotspots by sorting the citations without self-citations of the articles in the Web of Science.