Record Linkage for Public Health Surveillance R package starling version 1.1.0 Record linkage for public health surveillance datasets using either the Fellegi-Sunter probabilistic framework (via reclin2) or deterministic exact-key matching. Provides pre-linkage data quality auditing (preflight()), Medicare number checksum validation (check_medicare()), blocking variable construction (flock()), and the murmuration() linkage engine. murmuration() expresses linkage as a single cohort-to-event concept (linking a linelist of people to a dated stream of vaccination, hospitalisation, or case events within a before/during/after time window), with the historical four-code taxonomy (case-to-hospitalisation, vaccination-to-case, vaccination-to-hospitalisation, vaccination-to-event) retained as deprecated aliases. Also provides linkage weight distribution visualisation (murmuration_plot()) and threshold sensitivity analysis (perch()) with annotated AIHW, WA Data Linkage Unit, and PHRN reference benchmarks. perch() can be called standalone or triggered automatically mid-linkage via murmuration(perch_before_linking = TRUE). Includes synthetic datasets (cases_notifiable, vax_air) and three vignettes demonstrating the complete linkage workflow. Part of the aviary public health surveillance ecosystem. Software Depends: R (>= 4.1) Imports: reclin2, dplyr, stringr, lubridate, rlang, ggplot2 Suggests: patchwork, plotly, phonics, mudnester, testthat (>= 3.0.0), knitr, rmarkdown Nicolas Smoll <nicolas.smoll@health.qld.gov.au> Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) Nicolas Smoll [aut, cre] (ORCID: <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6923-9701>) MIT + file LICENSE (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=starling/LICENSE) 2026-07-10 application/tgz https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=starling doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.starling